


Keep Your Hands Unfolded

by Consort of the Moribund (Inksinger)



Series: Night Will Bring No Dawn [1]
Category: Warcraft - All Media Types
Genre: Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Fantastic Racism, Forced Incest, Gore, Graphic Description, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Loss of Faith, M/M, Major Character Injury, Major Character Torture, Major Character Undeath, Mutual Non-Con, POV: Rapist, Physical Torture, Psychological Torture, Racism, Rape, Rape for Sport, Torture, Torture for Sport
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2017-09-09
Packaged: 2018-08-08 12:12:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 57,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7757422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inksinger/pseuds/Consort%20of%20the%20Moribund
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Infuriated with the continued resistance of the quel’dorei against the Scourge's march to the Sunwell, Arthas orders his death knights to go out and capture a number of their rangers alive to be tortured for his amusement.</p><p>This story is set in the same alternate universe as Night Will Bring No Dawn, and is something of a spiritual prequel to that story. As such, expect everything here to diverge from canon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Game

**Author's Note:**

> There's no use praying here.

Arthas was not a happy man.

The invasion of Quel'Thalas had dragged on for weeks, now, and even now that the Scourge had done away with the leaders and figureheads of this wretched kingdom, the elves remained infuriatingly stubborn in their defense of what remained of their homeland. Killing off civilian villages had made them angrier rather than disheartening them, and like a swarm of fire ants they had begun attacking as much as they defended; in two of the smaller battles, they had even managed to push his forces back.

Taking their ranger-general and twisting her into one of his slaves had crippled their ranger corps for only a few days. Arthas had pressed that advantage as well as he was able, but now it seemed the Farstriders had found a new rallying point—one to which many of the remaining civilians were also drawn. The sudden rebound had ground Arthas’ progress towards the heart of the elven kingdom to a standstill, and _someone_ needed to pay for it.

Taking his ire out on Sylvanas had only provided a moment's relief; now fully under his control, the woman possessed no will of her own and reacted to his abuse only as she thought he wanted her to. The moment he allowed her to drag herself away, she returned to normal, casually stitching herself back together as she made her way towards the nearest necromancer to be made whole again.

It wasn’t enough. Arthas didn't want to vent his frustrations with someone who screamed because he wanted them to. He wanted to crush the spirit from fresh, unbound mortals who would react organically to the torment he inflicted upon them, and who would _remain_ broken long afterwards.

At the end of his patience, the Scourge champion finally summoned his informant to his side. Dar’khan Drathir was a simpering, greedy creature, wholly devoted to the Scourge—or, more accurately, to Arthas—even without having been turned to one of the undead, and because of that he would no doubt only respond to Arthas’ abuse with the same dutiful dismay that the champion's fits of anger usually elicited from him. Arthas wasn't certain, of course, because he had never actually bothered with the worm—but Dar’khan didn't make it hard to guess.

“You failed to warn me of your kind’s resilience,” the champion growled when Dar’khan appeared in his tent. “In fact, you nearly had me convinced that they would lay down their bows and swords and scatter in all directions once we defeated their wards. Are you an idiot, or is this your idea of a joke, elf?”

“They are proving more stubborn than even I anticipated,” the mage admitted. He wrung his hands for a moment before fiddling with the signet ring on his left hand; the garnet at its center glinted in the light cast by a nearby brazier, which burned with unholy blue fire.

“An idiot, then.” Arthas leaned forward in his seat, eyes flashing dangerously. “I don't have time for idiots, Dar’khan, so unless you have a way to resolve this—”

“Of course, My Lord.” If anyone else had bowed as deeply and theatrically as Dar’khan did now, Arthas would have killed them for their insolence—but Dar’khan had proven himself an incredibly melodramatic creature in general, and so the champion grudgingly let it pass.

“Each time we have crippled them, it has been through the murder or turning of their leaders.” Dar’khan ticked names off on one set of manicured fingers as he spoke. “The Convocation dismantled. Anasterian slain and left for the ghouls to devour as his forces attempted to recover the body. Sylvanas captured, twisted, and turned against her own rangers. Every loss has made them stagger long enough for our forces to gain ground.”

“Your point?” Damnation, of all the elves to have turned against their people, why did it have to be _this one?_

“We haven't yet located their latest rallying point,” Dar’khan continued, unperturbed, “but we can still crush their spirits. Merely slaying their villagers only made them angrier, but then those are expected targets, weak and untrained in battle of any sort. The trolls have hardened the Farstriders against the murder and mutilation of the common folk.” He stopped to chuckle to himself. “What they do _not_ expect are more examples to be made of their own comrades.”

Having so far been occupied with preventing himself from murdering the insufferable man before him by imagining all the different ways he could be murdered, Arthas snapped to attention at this. “I assume you have a plan,” he said.

“Naturally.” Another flourished bow, but now Dar’khan’s smile took on a predatory edge as he continued: “Capture the rangers alive—as many as can be taken. Bring them to our camp. Break them,” the elf hissed, clenching his fist in demonstration, “by whatever means necessary. When they have been brought to heel, march them out to the nearest village and put them on display for the elves there. Let their fellows and wards see them turned to dogs before the might of the Scourge, and then turn them and set them upon the living.”

Arthas sat back again, scratching the stubble that had begun to dust his chin over the last few days. “And here I thought your only use was as a spy,” he commented after a moment.

Again Dar’khan accepted the insult without so much as a twitch, bowing shallowly this time as he said, “I always strive for variety, My Lord.” He lifted his head and gave another slow, hungry smile as he added, “If I may, I do believe there are a few rangers in particular who would make _excellent_ targets.”

Trust a weasel to know exactly what to say to keep from outliving his own usefulness. Arthas leaned forward again, grinning in spite of himself. “I'm all ears, elf.”

 

The order was issued at nightfall. A unit of death knights set out as darkness enveloped the land, backed by banshees and a handful of cultists. Arthas had thought carefully about this task force: He had sent death knights to overpower the rangers, banshees whose screams would confuse and dismay their archers, and cultists who could bind the prisoners they took with spells for imprisonment and unconsciousness.

“Capture only the Farstriders,” he had instructed the unit. “If you find any civilians in the mix, kill them. Slowly.”

The majority of the unit reacted with muted pleasure; one or two cultists flexed their fingers at their sides, and the death knights and banshees made a show of rolling their shoulders or cracking already brittle knuckles. Orbaz Bloodbane, who had been added to the unit largely because undeath had not diminished his hatred for anything that was not a human being, visibly brightened at the order and drew himself up with an anticipatory gleam in his eyes. When Arthas gave the signal, Orbaz urged his death charger to the front of the unit and lead the others off at a hard gallop.

Arthas knew better than to wait around for his forces to return with their prisoners, and instead threw himself into the coordination of the invasion, convening with his generals and spies—and Dar’khan—to go over the next series of strikes. So far hammering relentlessly at the tiring elvish forces had proven his best strategy, and Arthas saw no reason to alter that unless and until his latest prisoners presented him with another avenue.

The elves were mortal; they tired, they grew desperate, they fell. So long as their dead continued to fill the gaps they carved in his forces, Arthas saw no cause for concern—only for aggravation at how _long_ this blasted war was dragging on.

The planning lasted until early the next morning, when a commotion outside the tent broke the relative stillness of the Scourge camp. The generals and spies left as if on cue; across the table, Dar’khan glanced Arthas’ way with a wicked grin. Arthas ignored him as he made his way outside, too eager to get his hands on a fresh mortal to worry about the fact that the elf was beginning to act as though he had forgotten his place.

The champion wasn't disappointed when he stepped through the small crowd his forces had created around the hunters. Although they were diminished in number, with a few of the cultists and banshees sporting marks that indicated their efforts to remain at range had been varyingly unsuccessful, the unit had managed to herd together a respectable gaggle of prisoners, and without having to render any of them unconscious, to boot.

“Caught the rats trying to shepherd a group of villagers to one of their camps.” Orbaz had a handprint smeared across his breastplate in blood; it went well with the wild light in his eyes as he jerked his head towards a handful of fresh ghouls and added, “Rounding up the real fighters went a lot more smoothly after those sad sacks were out of the way.”

One of the elves let out a snarl where he knelt with his comrades and was cuffed by another death knight for the outburst. Orbaz didn't turn at the sound, but his hand twitched at his side as though he dearly wished he had been the one to deal the blow.

Arthas smirked and stepped around Orbaz to get a better look at his prisoners. There were six in all, five men and a woman, the latter of whom Arthas belatedly realized had at some point had her face ripped open by something with claws and a foul temper. Despite the handful of dark, jagged scars she had to show for it, the she-elf didn't stand out against her peers; they all sported damaged armor and deep bruises and cuts from their capture.

“So this is the extent of the high elves’ defiance,” Arthas sneered. “Are all of your people so weak that they cannot protect a few stragglers, or were you the dregs of their defenses even before the invasion?”

The woman spat something shrill and angry at him in Thalassian; spurred by her outburst, two of the men followed up with their own slurs before all three were again silenced. Their three fellows remained silent and stony, watching Arthas with an air of spiteful resolve—until one of the blonds sat forward, his calm shattering completely as he snarled at something behind Arthas. The champion didn't turn; the sudden smell of bloodthistle and wine at his side identified the cause of the ranger's ire well enough.

“Dar’khan!” the ranger snapped. Somehow he managed to scramble to his feet with his arms bound firmly behind his back. “You _pig_ —”

Orbaz whirled and buried a fist in the ranger's stomach; the elf choked on his own cry and crashed back onto his knees, retching so powerfully that the first heave folded him forward at the waist and drove his forehead against the frost-covered ground.

“Good to see you again, Koltira.” Dar’khan’s voice somehow managed to sound even silkier than usual as he stepped into Arthas’ line of sight. “I see the weeks of hard fighting haven't been unkind to you. How is Lor'themar these days?”

Too winded yet to respond verbally, Koltira looked up and glared venomously at the traitor. A thin strand of saliva trickled from the corner of his mouth to join the puddle of drool and bile he'd left on the ground.

Arthas crossed his arms, watching the interaction with only mild interest. Lor'themar… that must be the ranger lord Dar’khan had gotten all his information from regarding the kingdom's defenses. Evidently Lor'themar had not been the only ranger to warm up to Dar’khan.

“We will tell you nothing.” That was the woman again, finally speaking in a respectable language as she stared daggers at Arthas. “We are not worms who would betray their own kind for _trinkets_ ,” she added with a furious jerk of her head towards Dar’khan. “You may as well kill us now and be done with it, _kim’jael_.”

Well, there was an insult Arthas recognized, at least. He had heard Dar’khan use it more than once when fending off particularly curious ghouls and geists. At some point he would have to ask the mage what it meant.

Arthas waved off his death knights as three of them—Orbaz included—moved as if to strike the woman again. To her credit, the ranger didn't flinch from them, though her eyes flicked from face to face before settling again on Arthas.

“You haven't been brought here for information,” Arthas informed the woman. “You're here to be tortured and broken for sport.” He smirked as the woman jerked forward and bared her teeth at him.

“There is no insult great enough for you,” she spat. “I have slain trolls with more honor!”

Arthas chuckled in the face of her hatred. “Oh, good. And here I was worried I could never outdo a tribe of cannibals.”

“Better to wind up as their food than your _toys_ ,” another elf snapped.

“Well, we have to do _something_ to alleviate all the frustration you've caused us.” Arthas shrugged. “It's better sport to break down warriors than it is to play with the mewling weaklings you stock your villages with.” He glanced at the new ghouls in time to watch two of them bat at each other like a pair of dogs at play. “Who knows? You might even make more useful additions than they did, if my men ever tire of you.”

He ignored the elves as they hurled another round of invective at him and turned instead to the death knights surrounding them. All of them straightened attentively, but Orbaz was not the only one whose eyes passed briefly over the captive elves. Arthas was relatively certain they were already picking out their victims.

“Divvy them up and enjoy yourselves,” he told them. “Try to make them last; these may be the last warm bodies you get to savor for a while.”

The elves were hauled to their feet by their respective death knights as the rest of the undead surrounding them began to jeer and make whatever sounds they could manage to mock the unlucky living. The female ranger let out a screech that nearly put the banshees to shame and swung her legs up to land a solid kick against the breastplate of one of the death knights; it took both that knight and Orbaz to subdue her, and this they accomplished only because Orbaz managed to wrestle both of her legs into a position that made something snap and drained all color from the she-devil's face.

“We're going to get along well, you and I,” Orbaz snarled as the trio disappeared through the crowd.

The men were no calmer as they were divided and lead off into the heart of the camp. Two had to have their feet and ankles broken before they could be hustled away; another continued to fight even after one of the death knights restraining him reached down and delivered a blow that shattered one of the elf's kneecaps. Only when the tendons behind his knees were slashed and the bleeding stopped with frost magic did the ranger finally sag and allow himself to be dragged away.

The mouthy blond Dar’khan had identified as Koltira swore as he was hauled up; his voice was thin with breathlessness, and his struggles were still noticeably weaker than those of his fellows. Even so, the man wrestling with him had to work to keep him controlled, and was beginning to eye the elf's legs contemplatively.

“That one is quick with his hands,” a voice called out over the din. “If you slash anything, make it his elbows. You'll have no end of trouble binding him otherwise.”

Koltira’s tormentor nodded shortly and shifted his grip on the elf so that he could draw a short, jagged-edged knife sheathed at his hip. He needn't have worried about his prisoner attempting to escape; Koltira had gone stone still at the sound of the new voice, and seemed unaware of the death knight's brief distraction as he raised his head and seemed to immediately lock onto someone in the crowd.

Arthas followed the elf's gaze and found himself staring at Thassarian, who stood near the front of the gathering with his arms crossed. If he was at all bothered by the wordless snarl Koltira let out, he didn't show it—but _Arthas_ found the elf's reaction very interesting.

It seemed the ranger had quite a bit of history with Thassarian, to be so riled by the sight of him now.

The death knight restraining Koltira chopped down into his elbow, sending blood spraying into the air as the elf screamed; his legs buckled for a moment, threatening to drag him out of his assailant’s grasp before he was hauled upright again. Arthas glanced back to Thassarian in time to see the his hand twitch, and for a split second, a crease seemed to form between the man's brows.

“Ah, yes.” Arthas grimaced and turned to put Dar’khan back in his field of vision as the mage continued, “I remember now. Koltira mentioned to me once—in confidence, of course—that he used to meet infrequently with a human soldier along our southern border. I do believe he mentioned the man was called Thassarian.”

“It sounds as though you had quite a few friends among the rangers of Quel'Thalas,” Arthas commented.

He watched Dar’khan from the corner of his eye; it was never a wise idea to let a mage out of one's sight for too long. But Arthas kept his main focus on Koltira as the elf's other arm was similarly immobilized. As with his comrades, frost magic was used to prevent the man from bleeding out, sealing the broken blood vessels enough to slow the blood loss to a slow dribble down the ranger's arms. The ranger thrashed feebly, only to fall still with another cry when his captor struck one of the new gouges.

Dar’khan moved in his peripheral, likely fiddling with his signet ring again. “Koltira belongs to a company led by Halduron Brightwing—who, in turn, is one of the captains under Lor'themar's command. To his great misfortune, young Koltira was just as quick as his ranger-lord to befriend me.” The mage paused to chuckle. “There were… perks to having earned the trust of such a high-ranking man. The rangers were _dreadfully_ tight-knit that way.”

Arthas grimaced. He couldn't care less about the sort of “perks” Dar’khan had enjoyed while he was busy kissing Lor'themar's ass. The information preceding that, however…

“Did Koltira ever say anything about the nature of his rendezvous with Thassarian?” Arthas asked, turning his full attention to Dar’khan. If his hunch was correct, Koltira wouldn’t be the first elf to have taken to someone outside his own species…

Dar’khan sighed and made a show of pretending to study his nails as he said, “Oh, he claimed they were simply ‘swift friends.’ Though I always thought it a bit odd that mere friendship took hours at a time to flourish,” he added, his voice dropping to a more menacing pitch.

Arthas narrowed his eyes, but another scream returned his attention to Koltira before he could comment on Dar’khan’s increasingly comfortable behavior. The death knight restraining the Koltira was bent low, and as Arthas watched he jerked his knife away from a deep gash in the back of the ranger’s right knee. Koltira fell to his knees, only to be dragged upright again and cuffed across the back of his head.

“If I may, My Lord, I think it would be most effective if Thassarian were to have a hand in Koltira’s torture.” Dar’khan stood so close now that Arthas nearly brushed shoulders with him as he turned to face the weasel full-on, but at least he had sense enough to scurry back out of easy reach and bow again as he added, “Merely a suggestion, of course.”

Arthas grunted and turned back to watch as Koltira was dragged away; the elf was taller by a head than the death knight who hauled him along, but the gouge in Koltira’s knee showed bone when he flexed that leg and kept him from bearing any weight on it, effectively hobbling him. His tormentor kept a hand on one of his elbows and jerked hard against the wound there whenever Koltira failed to keep step with him.

“I won't set Thassarian on him yet,” Arthas said. “He'll be expecting that. We all saw them lock eyes, after all. Let him have enough time to decide Thassarian won't be involved; it'll make the blow land harder.”

“An excellent plan, My Lord! Prolong Koltira’s torment enough and he will _beg_ for the mercy of undeath!” The wild, worshipful light was back in Dar’khan’s eyes again, and it clashed badly with the toothy grin on his face.

“If I need someone to fawn over me, you'll be the first to know,” Arthas said dryly. “For now, go make yourself useful and catch up with Tyrannus. He'll need your insight for the attack this afternoon.”

Dar’khan bowed low and made a quick exit. At least he had enough sense to know when to shut up; Arthas added that to his thin list of reasons for keeping the elf alive as he returned to his tent. Later, when the elves had become acquainted with their jailers, he would make his rounds and decide what to do with each of them. Dar’khan had presented him with the chance to deliver a ruthless message to the remaining high elves, but Arthas had a few ideas of his own in regards to some of the nameless prisoners that extended well beyond a quick blow to their comrades’ morale.

In any event, daylight would bring with it more entertainment than Arthas had seen in days. The anticipation did wonders for the champion's nettled temper.

 

Koltira’s youth did not make him a weakling by any stretch. In their long war against the Amani trolls, the rangers of Quel'Thalas had learned hardiness in the face of the most gruesome circumstances. The Scourge invasion had tested that, tempered it with endless death and spreading rot and growing despair. If Koltira had still shown any signs of his inexperience before the invasion, the undead had killed that softness in him.

He did not pray that he would have enough strength to endure what awaited him. He couldn't see the point of praying when No One was willing to answer.

He was dragged away through the Scourge camp, hauled along with no regard for the joints his captor had destroyed and frequently clouted across the shoulders for his inability to keep pace with the brute. More than once, they passed a cultist or well-preserved undead human who took great pleasure in offering Koltira insults that ranged from childish to obscene. He was struck each time he tried to respond to these in kind.

Their destination was an open area of the Scourge camp that was littered with metal cages and racks and other machines and devices for which Koltira had no name. Nearly all were guarded by cultists and death knights, and nearly all played host to one or several _living_ elves and humans. Most of these prisoners had been stripped down to a few ratty remnants of cloth that hung loosely about their shoulders or hips; only the newest among them had enough of their undergarments left to retain any level of modesty. These were also the only ones who still screamed or fought their tormentors; Koltira turned his eyes away and did not look up again after one particularly feisty woman had her jaw broken for her efforts.

Koltira was ultimately brought to a small, circular area just large enough to accommodate the vertical stone slab at its center, beside which stood a middle-aged human man draped in the robes of a lower-ranked cultist. The space rested in a shallow crater that had been dug or carved into the land very recently, and its edges had been picked out in child-sized skulls and a few burned-down candles.

And of course they would use the skulls of children, Koltira thought darkly. There were no words or curses in Thalassian vile enough to fit the Scourge.

Koltira was stripped of his armor, held in place by some paralyzing spell cast by the cultist while the death knight reduced him to cottons. Once this was done, the ranger was thrown back against the stone slab and pinned there with a one-handed grip on his neck that all but choked off his air supply. While his torturer held him down, skeletons wrapped spiked chains about Koltira’s wrists and ankles, then dragged the leftover chain back around the sides and over the top of the slab. Something was used to secure the ends tightly enough to cause his restraints to gouge into his limbs, and although the spikes were able to plug the wounds, blood trickled from each puncture and drew vivid lines across his skin.

A crowd had begun to gather just beyond the clearing, and although it was comprised of only a few banshees and skeletons, Koltira was sure that number would grow as his torture proceeded. He wasn't sure—he had never taken the time to study the exact physiology of the undead beyond learning their weak points—but he thought the banshees at least had all been human. None seemed to have been created from fallen elvish women.

The death knight didn't say a word before he began his work. Those of Koltira’s joints that remained uninjured were systematically slashed to the bones; when that was done, the death knight applied frost magic to every last open wound, freezing the tissue there until shards of his own blood stabbed into his blackened flesh. That was enough to knock him out twice, but each time he was brought back around with a touch of Scourge magic that left him feeling as though someone had poured slime into his ears and let it drain through his skull.

The worst gouges and chops in his joints had been mended when he came around the second time, the tendons there repaired and the skin frostbitten but relatively whole. Koltira wasn't able to figure out why his tormentor would undo his work before his right knee was shattered under the weight of a crude, blood-encrusted sledgehammer. The world went white before his eyes, but now through the agony Koltira could feel the sharp pull of magic at the back of his mind; it felt like a net, jagged and cold like falling into an ice bath on a summer day. Oblivion did not come a third time to rescue him from the pain—and neither did the shock or pain have any more ability to draw his mind away from the worst of his torment.

Someone was using magic on him—keeping him awake and focused on what was being done to him. The horror must have shown on his face or in his body, because laughter suddenly sprang from his audience. There seemed more voices now than there had been watchers before.

Unable to retreat into the blackness of unconsciousness, Koltira could do little more than tremble and finally go limp as the pain slowly ebbed away from his system, numbed by a flood of badly needed adrenalin. The death knight stood back and watched, still holding the sledge in one hand. Koltira wasn't so naïve as to think he was done smashing bones; even trolls understood the mechanics of pain better than that. With an audience to egg him on, the death knight likely would not stop until ordered to do so.

Left with nothing else to do, Koltira spat at his assailant; the display was robotic this time, lacking any of the fire from before. He could have drawn a breath with just as much conscious thought as went into his defiance now, and to the delight of the onlooking Scourge the bloody froth that flew from his lips fell far short of its intended target—but at least it was something to do. Better to offer knee-jerk defiance than nothing at all.

The death knight grinned wolfishly at his fellows and gave his sledge a flick, spinning the grip in his hand as though he was getting ready to knock down a stone wall rather than shatter someone's joints. His next target was Koltira’s left knee, and this time he swung twice, crushing the joint between the hammer and the stone slab before coming back around and striking from the side to cave the leg inwards towards its mate.

Koltira could taste blood by the time he finished screaming. His throat felt as though he had swallowed a handful of chestnuts still in their burr, and he wondered if it was possible to tax his throat to the point of choking himself.

His elbows were destroyed next, followed by his wrists and then his ankles. Somewhere during that time, Koltira had closed his eyes and not opened them again; he remained awake, and the pain remained fresh and unfiltered by shock or weariness, but they at least let him look away rather than pry his eyelids open with another breeze of foul magic. He was in too much pain to care about what motivated their stroke of pity.

He looked up again at the sound of the hammer falling to the ground. It lay beside the death knight in a puddle of auburn mud, and Koltira was relatively certain he was not imagining the flecks of bone that littered its head. The hammer blows had torn loose whole strips of flesh, leaving them dangling or speared by the myriad of shattered bone fragments that had been laid bare. He was sure his elbows looked just as bad, if not worse; it was a wonder his arms had not snapped in two under his weight.

The death knight closed with him, and Koltira felt his body draw back against the stone slab in response. Discarding the hammer did not make this monster any less able to do him harm.

Koltira braced himself, expecting to be struck across the jaw, but when the death knight lashed out it was to slam the heel of his open hand against Koltira’s right shoulder. The joint splintered under the impact, and a flash of white-hot agony blinded Koltira—but it did not leave him paralyzed. Even in the midst of his screaming, the ranger whipped his head around as far as he could and sank his teeth into the death knight's hand. He felt leathery flesh split apart and tasted ichor; this one had removed his gauntlets, and whatever the reason it had offered Koltira the opportunity to retaliate, however futile the gesture may be.

The death knight snarled and boxed him hard across one ear, shattering the eardrum with a blast of pain that sent the world whirling around Koltira. The ranger cried out, or thought he did, and somewhere in the chaos his jaw was caught and his head pinned back against the stone slab so that his mouth was held open. There was a bark from somewhere vaguely in front of Koltira, and slowly, slowly the world came to a stop again.

The death knight had brought himself dangerously close to Koltira; what remained of the tip of his maggot-bitten nose nearly brushed Koltira’s own as the formerly human man eyed his victim with a look that could have been an enraged snarl or a savage grin—Koltira couldn't quite say which.

“That hurt, elf,” the death knight growled. Somehow the unnatural echo of his voice caused the creature's already deep voice to toe the line between sound and sensation, and Koltira felt a thin shot of ice travel the length of his spine in response.

His mouth was still being held open, and now Koltira realized how his tormentor was accomplishing this: One hand was braced painfully against Koltira’s forehead, holding him still while the other hand maintained a grip on the underside of his jaw that made the death knight's fingers dig into Koltira’s cheeks. A little lower, and the hand at his jaw could slam into his throat, crushing his windpipe and spine in one blow. It was no comfort to know that his tormentor wouldn't let him die that easily.

“You should be proud of yourself,” the death knight continued. The grip on Koltira’s jaw tightened down, and some of his teeth began to register the pressure at their roots. Chuckles sounded behind him. “It's not everyone who can say they hurt one of us. Too bad you hairless cats can't be bothered to fight with your teeth when it _really_ matters.”

Again the death knight tightened his grip, and the dull pressure in Koltira’s jaw began to build to a pulsing ache. The ranger's cheeks flexed upwards as well as they were able as the pain continued to increase; his upper lip pulled back from his teeth in the semblance of a snarl.

The next happened all in a blur.

With a sick _crunch_ the death knight closed his hand around Koltira’s jaw. The main bone shattered, ripping several of his teeth loose in the process. Koltira shrieked and spasmed hard against his chains, and then darkness—merciful, cool, quiet darkness—swept over him, and for a moment he knew nothing more.

Too soon, he was brought back around, his jaw thundering with pain but feeling whole again. Koltira ran his tongue along the backs of his teeth, reassuring himself with how solidly they were grounded in his remade gums. He didn't wonder how they had found and returned each tooth to its proper place; that wasn't something he was willing to think about, not an image he was ready to conjure up. He wasn't even sure how many had been knocked out to begin with.

The ache in his jaw persisted, but as his mind began to clear Koltira realized the pain _was_ subsiding, helped along by the fact that his mouth was no longer being prised open. His tormentor was gone for the time being—another small comfort, likely to end at any moment with the onslaught of some new punishment.

Koltira sighed, judging the quiet show of relief an acceptable one for now. His gaze traveled downward towards his knees; they were bruised and caked in dried gore, but they appeared whole again besides that. A careful flex of each leg brought him only a mild twinge of pain; they must have pieced him back together again while he was unconscious. Perhaps it was a prerequisite of joining the Scourge to possess a love of jigsaw puzzles.

His shoulders itched, and without thinking Koltira tried to pull himself up with his arms. There was a loud snap, and for a moment Koltira was so lost to his own screams that he scarcely even registered the agony that swept through his shoulder a second later—and then the shot of adrenalin faded out, and his screaming redoubled.

His shattered shoulder stretched unnaturally as the right side of his body sagged, his chains slackening somewhat with the extra inch or so the injury added to the reach of that arm. The left arm lay flattened against the stone slab, its elbow still a mangled heap of flesh and bone. With the right side of Koltira’s body no longer as rigidly supported as before, the left arm was forced to bear more of his weight, and even as he continued to scream Koltira ground his teeth against the pain and the sudden twist of nausea that came with it as something in the left elbow began to crack under the strain. He was almost relieved when he felt the now familiar wash of black magic flood through his left arm, forcing the bones and tissues of that elbow to come back together before his arm could be ripped into pieces.

By the time Koltira’s vision stopped swimming and he could make sense of his surroundings again, the death knight was back beside him, and now the brute had company in the form of a slight female cultist who bore a tray carrying a handful of needles—some bent or rusted or snapped in half, some sewing needles and others clearly broken away from syringes.

Koltira’s stomach went cold at the sight of them, and he squirmed in his restraints as the death knight drew near. Laughter and a few jeering comments sounded from the edge of the clearing again—or had they never ceased, and had Koltira simply been in too much pain to notice them before?

“Quite a job my cultist had, putting your jaw back together.” The death knight sounded almost conversational as he gave the needles a critical, speculative look. “He's told me to stop breaking bones until he's caught his breath. I suppose mortals can only do so much at a time, after all.”

Pale eyes flicked up to meet Koltira’s gaze, and the brute grinned as he said, “I'll have to work on softer stuff in the meantime.”

The death knight turned and plucked a particularly large sewing needle from the tray and bent it between his thumb and forefinger, then grabbed the tip of one of Koltira’s ears and forced the twisted scrap through the cartilage. Koltira snarled and flinched from the pain, but after the smashing and carving he had already endured, this was almost comparable to the sting of rose thorns against his palm.

The death knight took note of Koltira’s subdued reaction and sneered; faster than Koltira could have dodged away, he grabbed the needle—still lodged through the elf's ear—and gave it a twisting, outward pull, slowing his movements when the flesh and cartilage began to tear under the strain.

 _Now_ Koltira screamed again, and this time the sound of it was high and thin as he strained against his bindings. Such torture would have been agony to most humans; to a high elf like Koltira, possessed of overcharged nerve endings throughout his scalp and ears, it was torment beyond description, powerful enough to blind him and nullify whatever witchcraft had thus far kept his mind focused and clear. The raucous laughter of his audience faded into the thunder of blood pounding in his ears and the high keening of his shrieks.

When the needle finally came free, it severed the top half of the sliver of flesh it had torn free from Koltira’s ear; the sliver flopped down, held in place by a thread of skin. Under the sliver’s own weight, that skin peeled away, leaving a livid red line down the length of Koltira’s ear as the ranger's screams gradually calmed to a series of high-pitched grunts spat through clenched teeth.

The death knight let the process come to its own stop—which it did, near the halfway point of the cusp—before reaching out and manually tearing the bit of flesh away. Koltira’s scream was short and shrill, and for a moment his eyes rolled back in his head. Magic shook through his skull like a blast of frigid wind, preventing the elf from blacking out.

Koltira was given time enough to catch his breath; the hard, coughing whimpers he bit out as he lay trembling against the slab eventually lapsed into silence, and when they did his tormentor was ready with another needle to start a similar process on his other ear.

It took an hour for the death knight to run out of creative ways to use his needles. He left the last one—a rusted, dirty bit of metal that looked as though it had been resurrected along with one of the ghouls—lodged lengthwise in Koltira’s ear after a full minute of slowly pushing it upwards into the flesh of his earlobe.

By now Koltira had lost a great deal of strength in his struggles, and lay utterly limp in his chains, too weak now even to tremble as the cultist and her tray of bloody needles were finally shooed away through the crowd of onlookers. The elf's lips were stained red from the blood his screaming had finally drawn from the insides of his throat, and lines of pinkish-orange foam dotted the corners of his mouth. His eyes were hollow and weary, their blue glow dimmed considerably as his gaze wandered listlessly about the torture area and across the sneering faces of the crowd gathered at its edge.

Koltira was no stranger to suffering; one of his earliest trials as a fresh recruit had been to familiarize himself with the sort of tortures that might await him should he be captured by the trolls, who were by then notorious for tormenting their prisoners for sport before disposing of them. Halduron—popular throughout the ranger corps either despite or because of his reputation for sowing his wild oats wherever he was able—had surprised Koltira and his two fellow recruits that day.

Far from the brotherly comrade they knew off duty, far again from the exacting but not unforgiving captain who had recruited and trained them, he had spent several hours teaching them all the reasons to avoid being captured, and reminded them all the while that he was being far gentler with them than any troll would ever be.

But he had left their ears alone. Trolls only very rarely targeted the ears of a captured elf—they weren't as much fun, Halduron had calmly surmised between blows across their shoulders, when their prisoners had much larger, fleshier body parts to mutilate. When a troll did go after an elf's ears, it was usually to cut them off as a trophy, and that, while excruciating, was a pain that would swiftly fade once the deed was done and the adrenalin had begun to flow.

Halduron had treated them instead to hallucinogenic smokes and poisons, to knives along their guts and thunderous strikes of a fist or foot against their joints and across their backs. He had even grabbed each recruit by the hair and dragged them viciously about, waiting to release each one until they had stopped flailing uselessly about and started attempting to fight him off. He had trusted that those and the other, harsher trials he put them through that day would be enough to harden them so that they could survive the Amani.

No one had expected the Scourge to come along, much less to shatter their defences and herd and harry the elves through their own homeland like wolves after a flock of sheep. Even after all he had endured, Koltira could not find it in him to blame Halduron for his oversight. It _had_ been enough for the trolls—the Scourge were simply a different beast altogether.

Perhaps they were a nightmare the quel’dorei were not designed to combat. Perhaps there _was_ no way to fight something as horrific as the Scourge. What was the point in trying? They grew with every grave they desecrated; their losses were recovered with every battlefield their cultists looted. How could mortal creatures hope to ever truly defeat the immortal undead?

A hard, open-handed strike across his face snapped Koltira from his thoughts and sent specks of bright white blossoming in his vision. His neck twinged as he shook his head to clear it.

“Good, he's still breathing.”

Koltira froze; dread tore through the haze of exhaustion as he raised his eyes, somehow managing to scrounge up a shred of hope that he was wrong, that this new speaker was _not_ who he thought…

Arthas met his wandering gaze and grinned.


	2. Set

Arthas tilted his head and watched with undisguised amusement as the elf slowly met his gaze. There certainly wasn't much in the way of defiance now in the lines of Koltira’s broken body; the boy trembled and visibly seemed to cringe back against his own bindings the moment recognition touched his features.

“I see you did something about those ridiculous ears,” Arthas commented. Dried blood streaked down the sides of Koltira’s neck and colored what remained of his ears; whole chunks of flesh had been torn and cut away from the outer edges, leaving their knife-like tips in tattered ruins. There even seemed to be a needle gouging upwards through one earlobe.

The death knight who had carried out Koltira’s torture grinned. “You should have heard him when I started, Lord. He squealed like a little pig the whole time.”

Koltira flinched at that, and some fire returned to his eyes as he fixed a tired glare on his tormentor.

Arthas pretended not to notice the elf's reaction as he snorted and said, “He's an _elf_. Of course he'd scream about his precious ears; if you'd done anything to his hair, he might have snapped completely.”

Koltira’s glare swung towards Arthas as the crowd of onlookers laughed. The muscles in the elf's abdomen tightened infinitesimally.

“I thought I'd be polite and give the poor thing the chance to recover before I started on his hands.” Koltira’s torturer cracked his knuckles and grinned at the flinch the sound elicited from the elf. “Thassarian said he's quick with his hands. I'm willing to bet taking those from him will douse whatever fire he still has.”

Koltira jerked at his chains—though not, Arthas suspected, because of the threat to his hands. The sharp breath the elf let out through his nose and the increasingly dour set to his features spoke to something more complicated than self-preservation.

“You've done enough,” Arthas said, clapping the other death knight on his arm to avoid the spikes of his pauldron. “I have a better idea for this one. Have the cultists patch him up and bring him to my tent—but keep the ears that way. It's an improvement.”

The death knight grinned until his bloodless gums were laid bare and saluted Arthas with a badly stifled chuckle. Behind him, Koltira had frozen in his bonds again; the ranger's face turned bone white as he stared with open incredulity at Arthas.

Rather than tell the elf not to flatter himself—as if he had any use for some prissy knife-ear—Arthas turned without another word and stalked away through the crowd of Scourge minions who had gathered to watch. It would be better to let Koltira stew in his own dread for the moment, regardless of what he thought he was in for. The shock of being proven _somewhat_ wrong would make the next phase of his torture hit him even harder.

Koltira watched numbly as Arthas folded out of sight again, lost in the crowd of cultists and undead gathered around the clearing. Patched up and brought to his tent… the ranger's stomach churned as a cultist drew near and began to work on his shoulder.

No. Arthas was a monster, but he wasn't a deviant one. Surely the images playing out in Koltira’s head were unwarranted, fabrications produced by the long hours he had spent awake and enduring hideous levels of mutilation.

 _He could torture you here, if he wanted,_ whispered some wheedling voice at the back of his mind that sounded far too much like Dar’khan’s. _He could make a show of it for his forces, as he did to Sylvanas. Why would he have you brought to the privacy of his tent if he only planned to break more of your bones and carve away more of your flesh?_

Koltira closed his eyes and made himself focus on the pain that ricocheted about through his shoulder. Arthas could do whatever he damn well pleased and wherever he damn well chose. No one in this army of mindless sycophants would question it, let alone argue against it.

_Then what's stopping him from doing worse to you than shattering your joints?_

The pain in his shoulder had ceased, and he chanced a look at it. Barring a few fading red lines, it was as though nothing at all had been done to the joint—though he was sure it would ache furiously once he was let down again.

There was a stabbing shot through his earlobe; the death knight chuckled and waved a bent, gory little needle about in front of Koltira’s nose as the elf snarled and tossed his head. The needle had hooked a last piece of flesh as it was ripped free; somehow seeing his own skin dangling from one of the implements of his torment was more sickening to Koltira than having seen shards of his own bones littering the sledgehammer before, and the ranger swallowed hard against a sudden swell of bile at the back of his throat.

And then the death knight brought the needle to his lips and _ate_ that little scrap of flesh, and what composure Koltira had managed to draw about himself shattered. He gagged and vomited, the muscles in his arms and stomach flexing and tightening down painfully as his body fought to double over. He only barely registered the sound of the death knight laughing as he choked back another bout.

By the time he had managed to settle his gut again, the work on his limbs had been completed and the cultist had disappeared—behind the stone slab, apparently, because Koltira could feel the chains beginning to loosen around his legs. They fell slack a few seconds later, leaving his newly healed arms to bear the entirety of his weight until the cultist could free those, as well. Koltira ground his teeth together and glared venomously at the death knight, who was now making a show of picking his teeth with the needle and eyeing Koltira as though he was weighing the consequences of taking a larger chunk of flesh from him. Chuckles bubbled among their audience, dark and suggestive enough to raise the hair on the back of Koltira’s neck. Maybe Arthas wasn't a deviant, but the rest of his army…

The chains around his arms gave way without warning, throwing Koltira to the ground. His legs shook under his weight, and a sharp ache jolted through both knees, but he was able to keep his feet. Lowering his arms was the more painful task; after the hours they had spent holding his weight and the abuse that had been piled onto their joints, lowering them again was enough to make Koltira’s eyes water. The right shoulder, in particular, felt for a moment as though there were a few shards of bone floating loose in the flesh surrounding the joint. He hoped that wasn't the case.

The death knight only let him wobble about for a moment before reaching out and grabbing Koltira’s bad arm, jerking on it so hard that the joint nearly dislocated again. The ranger snarled, his knees buckling for a moment before he regained his footing and stumbled blindly towards his tormentor—anything to make the pain stop, anything if it meant his shoulder wasn't destroyed a second time. He cursed his weakness as the death knight snared his other arm and barked something at the cultist in a language Koltira didn't understand. The cultist spoke a word of power—apparently—and what felt like ice and ice water slithered around Koltira’s arms, binding them securely behind his back.

“Try to run, elf,” the death knight invited as he shoved Koltira forward. “It'll be the last chance I get to have a little fun with you before He gets a hold of you.”

Koltira set his jaw and walked on without any trouble. It would do him no good to run; he was weary from his torment, his knees wobbled and ached with each step he took, and where would he go at the heart of his enemies’ camp that would not be swarming with hungry, brutish undead? At this point, the best he could do was spite his captors by refusing to give them any more legitimate reasons to strike him, and pray that their near-worshipful fear of Arthas would be enough to prevent them from doing so without provocation.

The walk back through the other prisoners was worse; now Koltira knew the amount of pain their overseers were so casually inflicting upon them. Now he felt echoes of it in his bones.

A high, scraping shriek drew the ranger's attention to the woman who had so viciously fought against her torturers when Koltira had first been marched through the makeshift prison. She had been moved from her earlier perch to another skull-lined divot in the ground like the one Koltira had occupied; however, instead of being strapped to a stone slab, the woman’s hands were bound against each other and tethered by a short chain to a metal post that could not have jutted more than a foot from the ground at the center of the clearing. This forced the woman to kneel close beside the post, leaving her prone no matter what position she took up.

The cause of her scream had been the creature at her back. The thing seemed to be some oversized, cycloptic version of a ghoul, and as Koltira stopped to watch it sank its claws into the woman's sides and dragged downwards, ripping great gouges that gushed blood down the woman's pale skin. She screamed again, and in response the creature leaned forward to set its head over her shoulder with what sounded like a gurgling chuckle. The movement brought into view the hangman’s rope around its neck as something pale and knotted slid from under its hood and into her open mouth.

Koltira turned away with another hard twist of nausea and locked eyes with another prisoner—a human man who was bound astride the chevalet in naught but his breeches. The man's face was drawn and ragged, his ribs prominent through his bruised skin. Tears ran from a pair of hollow eyes and traced a horizontal line across his nose and down the wooden horse. Behind Koltira there was the crunch of bones shattering between teeth, and the woman screamed again. The man flinched, then closed his eyes and let out a low, rattling moan that broke before it could become a sob. The trail of tears through the grime on his face became wider; the fall of them to the dust below him increased in speed until it was nearly a steady trickle.

Koltira’s escort landed a hard blow between the elf's shoulders with the heel of his hand, knocking him forward again as the woman's screams became shriller and more frantic. They weren't quite out of Koltira’s earshot before _something_ that sounded rather large was torn from the woman's body, silencing her screams in time for the weeping man to take up the litany with his own rasping wails.

Koltira kept his head down for the rest of the trek through the Scourge camp. If there had been a Light left to pray to, he would have begged It to blot out the sounds around him, or else destroy his ears so that he never heard anything again. If undeath awaited him, he hoped it would bring with it the obliteration of all memory of his mortal life, so that he could at least be free of the woman's screams and the weeping man's broken eyes.

It didn't take very long to reach Arthas’ tent, which came as no surprise to Koltira. With a weary, knee-jerk flash of spite, Koltira wondered whether Arthas enjoyed listening to the screams of his prisoners or simply couldn't be bothered to walk the length of his own camp to watch their torment.

There were two death knights acting as honor guard outside the tent, and at least they were good enough at the job not to stare as Koltira was brought forward—they only glanced once at him, then returned their attention to the rest of the camp as he was shoved through the flap and into the blue-lit shadows of the tent.

For a moment, the sudden switch from the misty, sickly light of the morning outside to the grim darkness inside blinded Koltira, and his eyes ached as they slowly readjusted to the new environment. His ears twitched as he waited for his vision to clear, and the slight movement made the cuts and gashes along their tips sting.

There was movement near the back of the tent; Koltira could hear the shiver of plate and mail and the soft brush of different types of fabric rubbing against each other. He didn't bother listening for any of the more subtle sounds of life—there would be none here, not when he was the only creature that needed to draw breath or maintain a healthy heartbeat to survive. At least the interior of the tent smelled more of musty, snow-battered canvas than it did of dead bodies. Koltira elected to take comfort in that as the dazzle finally cleared from his eyes.

His gaze landed first on the two figures at the back of the tent—both blond, both once human men, but that was where the similarities ground to a halt.

Arthas was recognizable enough when he stood in his skull-littered armor out in the dying sunlight; here, lounging in his makeshift throne—also adorned with skulls—he seemed more the spoiled prince he must have been before, even in spite of his lank, leached hair and his red-rimmed eyes. It was hard to spot out any similarities between this imperious madman and the ruthless commander whose leadership had turned the army outside into a great plow that destroyed the land and crushed all who stood in its way.

Blue light illuminated Arthas’ face, dim but still brighter than the light of the sconces that stood around the edges of the tent, and though he already knew what he would see Koltira’s gaze followed the stronger light to its source. The sight of Frostmourne propped against the throne where Arthas could grab it up at a second’s notice twisted Koltira’s stomach into a knot, and he decided it didn't matter whether or not Arthas looked the part without his unholy armor—death and destruction followed him regardless.

Thassarian stood at Arthas’ side, lacking the armor he had worn the day before and dressed instead in what a normal man might wear to do hard labor. Dark violet marks had been tattooed down both of the older man's weathered cheeks, and his hair, once simply graying as he had begun to move on from his prime, had been bleached a dull silver in undeath. His features were unchanged, save that there was no life in them anymore, no levity or curiosity. The stare he fixed on Koltira was cold and calculating; it was the look of a hawkstrider watching an injured fox, patiently waiting for its prey to fall before it moved in for the kill.

Koltira wondered what would constitute a fall in this scenario. The realization that he would find out soon enough did nothing to calm the sudden tremors through his arms, so he turned his attention away from the men and tried to focus on his surroundings as he was shoved forward.

Disregarding the chipped dais and the throne at the back of the tent, this looked a great deal like the command tents Koltira had been inside on the high elven side of this war. There was a large, round table with maps strewn across its surface; colored pins and carved figures that looked as though they had been repurposed from a human chess set marked the positions of different battlefields and key locations on the map. There was also a desk that housed all manner of correspondence, and Koltira caught himself wondering if any of these were written in blood. Likely all of them were.

There was a sense of permanence here. The papers were in disarray; the marks across the ground spoke to several days if not weeks of traffic. The knot in Koltira’s stomach tightened.

He was shoved to his knees before the dais; a dull pain rocketed through his legs at the impact, and Koltira gritted his teeth and swallowed down a cry. The pain was nothing; it was the association it now had with ruined bones and shredded flesh that threatened to wring weakness from him.

There was a beat of stillness in the tent, a thick, clotted silence that felt the way congealed blood looked—and then: “Well, now. You look even weaker on your knees than you did splayed across that stone, elf.”

Something about the way Arthas said that made Koltira’s skin crawl—his tone, perhaps, or else his choice of words. The elf gritted his teeth and didn't answer; he kept his head down, eyes trained on the ground in front of him.

His silence was met with a sharp crack of pain as the death knight who had tortured him slammed one foot into the meat of his lower back, driving the spikes of his boot through the flesh. Koltira snarled and pitched forward, and the spikes dragged lines through his skin before the death knight pulled away again.

There was no movement from Thassarian’s direction. That stung worse than the gouges in his back.

“No need for that, Brennan.” Arthas’ voice rang out calmly in the gloom. “Better if he saves his breath for what's coming.”

Arthas must have made some motion for the death knight to leave; there was an emptiness at his back, and the soil crunched as the death knight turned and walked away with a snort. _Brennan_ walked away—and then there came a belated swell of hatred as Koltira cursed himself for the correction.

Thassarian moved. For the fraction of a second—a fraction far too long—Koltira let himself forget that the man was a member of the Scourge army now, and held still, blindly trusting him to do something to alleviate this situation. His instant of idiocy was rewarded with another boot to his back, this one coming down flat against the dip between Koltira’s shoulders to press him down into the dirt. Now the ranger struggled, but his efforts only earned him more pressure between Thassarian’s foot and the frosted ground. Soon breathing itself became a trial, and eventually Koltira fell still once more.

Thassarian didn't move even to ease back on the pressure, but when the bindings around Koltira’s arms oozed away, slime retreating back to its source in the silent cultist, Koltira understood his behavior. Remembering well the strength Thassarian had possessed in life and knowing now how much undeath could amplify a being’s physical prowess, Koltira aired on the side of caution and slowly lowered his arms to the ground, palms up. It would take the blink of an eye to reverse them and shove himself up to his feet when the time came. Thassarian was always a slow one, and undeath could not possibly have had enough impact to make him a match for Koltira.

The air shifted again and was emptier when it stilled; the cultist had gone, as well. At least whatever was coming would be without an audience this time.

“You're certainly far calmer for Thassarian, aren't you, elf?” Arthas’ voice rang out before the stillness could settle in again completely. With no one but Koltira and Thassarian present to hear him, the bastard prince had taken on a slightly more genial tone to his voice.

Very slight.

“Your fellow rangers are being tortured still,” the wretch continued. “Theirs will not end until dawn tomorrow, when we march for your Stillriver Sanctuary. When we come before whatever pitiful defences your healers and innkeepers have managed to assemble there, the six of you will be made examples of.”

Thassarian shifted his weight to his heel, digging hard against Koltira’s spine as if to emphasize Arthas’ words. For a moment panic gnawed at the elf's stomach, and it took too long to fight back the urge to struggle. It would take no effort at all for the man to apply enough force to shatter Koltira’s spine; Arthas didn't necessarily need mobile prisoners for his examples.

“The men are weak,” Arthas continued, sounding now as though he was speaking more to himself than Koltira. “They will serve me as cannibals and carrion gatherers in undeath. I will have them flayed before your people and cut their throats only when each of them begs for the mercy of death.”

Pressure built up in Koltira’s teeth as he clenched his jaw; fury boiled in his gut, searing away the panic and threatening to spill out in a torrent of violence if it was not contained. He must have given some outward sign of his ire, because the weight against his back increased until each breath scraped along the walls of his throat.

Arthas watched the elf struggle against the ground and chuckled. “Is that all it takes to rile you, elf? Your soldiers are mine, now. Your civilians feed my ghouls and geists. What difference do another handful of rangers make?”

“Your father should have drowned you… while you were still a whelp.” The venom in Koltira’s declaration was ruined by the effort it took the boy to draw breath. Arthas glanced up at Thassarian; the man immediately eased off on his captive, giving Koltira more room to breathe. It wouldn't be any fun if the elf blacked out now.

“The woman could be a powerful addition to my army,” Arthas continued. “I can see why your people would send a savage like her to the front lines. If she had been backed by more competent allies, she might have been spared a little longer. What a shame she was stuck with you.”

Koltira’s lips pulled back, laying his teeth bare as a vicious snarl ripped from his chest. Arthas laughed at the display.

“You don't frighten me, elf, any more than your pitiful armies do.” The Scourge champion grinned as Koltira jerked and was rewarded with another increase in pressure as Thassarian shifted his weight back towards the elf. “You're no better than the cats that prowl the Eversong. I tamed them easily; you will be no different.”

“So kill me and be done with it!” Koltira spat. His face had gone white with rage; his eyes no longer seemed to focus on Arthas so much as in the champion’s general direction as he again attempted to struggle under Thassarian’s weight.

“Oh, I will,” Arthas said with another laugh. He twitched the fingers of one hand; like clockwork, Thassarian retreated from Koltira, allowing the elf to scramble onto his feet. “But you aren't tame yet, Koltira.”

Arthas expected the elf to come flying at him for that, or to try to bolt around Thassarian and escape out into the camp, so the champion was surprised when Koltira instead lunged _at_ Thassarian with his ridiculously long-nailed hands poised to rip at the human’s throat.

It went as well as any blind fool could have expected it to: Koltira was allowed to jam Thassarian’s head back before the death knight grabbed the elf by his jaw and an arm and threw him back to the ground as casually as he might toss a rug down to be unrolled. If Arthas didn't know better, he might even have said Thassarian rolled his eyes at the prisoner's outburst—but Arthas hadn't ordered him to do so and wasn't entirely sure how autonomous his soldiers could be while fully under his control, as Thassarian was now. Something to pay attention to for the next… oh, hour, surely.

Koltira hit the ground hard, and the impact felt as though it echoed twice through his ribs and hips before he caught his breath again. Nothing felt as though it had been broken, but _damn!_ If Thassarian had been a brute before, he was a monster now. Trying to neutralize the threat he posed in unarmed combat was out of the question. Koltira’s only chance was to flee.

Thassarian stood where he blocked the way out from his line of sight, putting him in the right position to shatter the bones of Koltira’s face with a well-placed kick if the mood struck him. Koltira didn't lurch upright; he rolled to his knees slowly, keeping his movements awkward and open and not having to work terribly hard at it. That landing had jarred him badly. He let himself pitch forward, one hand on his knee as though to brace himself for an upward push. Thassarian stepped back to give him room to move.

Koltira bolted forward, urging his body on past the pain and stiffness. A clear path—

A hand closed in his hair and dragged him to the side. Searing pain blinded Koltira; his training fled. Halduron had been kind, he thought as his body was hauled about. This hurt worse than he remembered.

Arthas was laughing again by the time the pain ended. Koltira had to shake his head to clear his vision of the white haze that clouded it; he couldn’t tell where or in what position he was pinned now. His nerves felt raw and scorched, not just along his scalp but everywhere, blocking out all other sensation for the moment.

…On his feet. He was standing; his vision was clear enough now to see down the length of his body. He was standing… his arms weren't visible and must be behind him. Another arm, thicker, covered along the top in white hairs, laid vertical against his chest. He saw, but couldn't feel it, not yet. The burning hadn't stopped yet.

He wondered if he was bleeding. Halduron hadn't cut them during his training, not along the scalp. Perhaps that was the difference. Were Thassarian’s nails sharp enough to tear skin?

“You're a more savage creature than the woman, aren't you?”

Koltira wished his hearing was as affected as his kinesthetic sense. Then he wouldn't have to hear Arthas monologuing at him.

He saw more than felt himself forced to his knees again. Thassarian’s arm didn't move from where it lay over his chest; the man must have knelt with him this time. Odd.

“I wonder,” Arthas was saying, “which of you is more worth the trouble—you, or the woman? She has the scars of a seasoned beast, but you…”

“What are you babbling about?” Koltira snapped. He felt vague pressure halting his forward lurch, but his sense of touch was still very much dulled out. It was more the movement of Thassarian’s arm, the sudden rigidity of the muscles there that told him he was being held in place.

Arthas grinned down at him like a wolf—no, like a warg, ugly and ragged and mad with the scent of blood.

“I had thought perhaps the woman could be given a high rank among my forces,” the bastard said, speaking slowly, meanderingly—the tone of one who had all the time in the world to make a decision. “She's vicious enough. She could even make a fine knight,” he added, and suddenly his tone and gaze sharpened to something feral and calculating.

Something ripped, or Koltira thought it did. He heard cotton tear, barely felt the pull of it. He ignored both, his rage so great it nearly choked him as he spat a curse at Arthas. The wretch only smiled at the sound of it, looking as though he found Koltira’s hatred _satisfying_ more than anything.

“But you,” Arthas said, each word careful, emphasized, weighted, “you still have the nerve to fight, after what you've been through. You still burn with hatred. I wonder if the woman is still as riled as you are.”

Another rip, another brief sensation of pressure. Slowly, slowly, Koltira was beginning to regain his sense of touch. He thought he felt a breath of cold air at his back, but perhaps that was an internal response to the look Arthas was leveling on him now.

“Maybe I'll do to her what I'd planned to do to you.” Arthas reached up and scratched at the stubble dusting his chin—a calculated gesture, not idle at all. No, nothing this bastard did was idle. Everything had a reason in his twisted mind. “Do you want to hear what I’ll do to her, elf? I think you should have the chance to appreciate it while your mind is still your own.”

“Laugh while you can, pig,” Koltira hissed through his teeth.

“I will hew her to pieces before your people,” Arthas spoke over him, leaning forward and dropping the tone of his voice to a thick, menacing rumble. “I'll have her bound on the rise to the west of your little village, naked and broken, where everyone will see her. My death knights will keep them from reaching her; my magi will keep any ranged fighters from ending her misery.”

Another rip, louder this time than the others. Koltira snarled and lurched forward again; this time he felt the pressure close down against his windpipe and realized belatedly that Thassarian had kept a hand around his throat.

“I'll take her hands first,” Arthas went on, his voice rising and falling in volume so that Koltira’s snarls couldn't drown out his words. “And then I'll take her feet. I'll use her own sword and deny her the gift of undeath even as my cultists pour magic into her to keep her alive.”

Koltira spat at him. He missed. A fourth rip sounded out. The chill spread down Koltira’s legs.

“Perhaps I'll let her down then. Let her attempt to crawl away, unable to run, unable to defend herself. It would be the merciful thing to do.” There was no mercy in the eyes Koltira stared into now. “I'll even escort her as she drags herself along, hacking away pieces of her legs with every inch. When those are gone, I'll cut her arms out from under her. She won't bleed out before then,” Arthas said, and his tone turned mockingly reassuring. “The cultists will stop the blood from spilling. She'll be alive and conscious while she lays limbless in the dust like the worm she is.”

Koltira’s vision had gone red; he could scarcely hear through the roaring in his ears now. Vaguely he registered a change in the way he was held down; there were more arms, and they were thinner. He couldn't break them. That didn't stop him from doing his damnedest to try.

“Are you listening, elf?” Arthas sounded far away and far too close. Koltira estimated a lunge of four feet between where he knelt and where the pig sat above him. “I will carve pieces from her torso next, pound by pound, and spill her entrails across the ground for all to see. And when there is nothing left but her head, I will take it from her remains and reanimate it before she can finish dying.”

Koltira felt himself shoved forward onto his hands, felt his knees kicked apart across the ground. Bony hands pinned him at the calves and ankles. He snarled and let loose a swell of curses until someone struck the back of his head. His eyes fell on Arthas’ face when he looked up again.

“I'll let her keep her free will.” The monster sneered as though the taste of the words was foul and lingering. He was leaning closer to Koltira. His voice was soft. “I'll set her somewhere high, where she can see and be seen by your people. I'll make them all watch as I turn your brothers-in-arms and feed them with the woman's flesh and bones.”

Koltira snapped his teeth at the beast. There was nothing else he could do, nothing he could think to do. There was a solid mass across his back now, cold, wide, not as heavy as it should be. He couldn't get up between it and the hands.

Arthas reached out and cupped Koltira’s jaw with one hand, his grip firm enough that the elf couldn't shake loose to bite him or turn his head away. “And when they've finished with that,” he said, and his voice nearly dropped to a whisper as he smiled at Koltira’s fury, “I will give them her head, and command them to devour the flesh from it—every last scrap—and she will be awake for every moment until the very end.”

Koltira shook. He said nothing; there were no words in any language he knew to describe this _creature_ in front of him. The weight around his back shifted, eased back, brushed his flesh.

Arthas watched him for a moment in silence. His smile sharpened. Something dark clouded his glassy eyes as he pulled himself up, resting his elbows across his knees.

“But you won't suffer the same fate,” he said, and now he almost sounded sincere. _Gentle._ It twisted Koltira’s guts to hear. “You're too powerful to waste on an example. You have too much fire for it. I have a better plan for you.”

“To the Void with you,” Koltira snarled.

“No, Koltira.” The pig said it as though he was admonishing a wayward pet. “To the grave with you.”

A cold, calloused hand brushed the bare skin of Koltira’s side, and with a jerk the elf looked down. That wasn't right. He felt no cloth, and he should…

It took two seconds for realization to dawn on him. It took longer for him to process a response to it.

He'd been stripped. In the numbness following the assault on his scalp, he hadn't felt it; in his rage against Arthas, he hadn't identified the sounds of it, hadn't bothered to respond to them. He was naked, pinned down on his hands and knees by rotted, dead hands—so many in one place, he thought. How could there be so many hands buried in the same place? Was there a mass grave in the soil beneath them?

Thassarian was the weight across his back, propped on one arm to steady himself while his other hand slid along the length of Koltira’s unclothed side. The man's eyes were lifeless, calculating. There was no recognition in them.

“No.” The word slipped from Koltira, broke twice on its way out, barely dented the quiet that had settled over the tent.

“There are no secrets in my army, Koltira.” Arthas didn't laugh, but Koltira could hear the amusement in his voice. “I have access to every memory my soldiers have left to them. Did you think I wouldn't look into Thassarian’s once the connection was made?”

“Dar’khan.” Koltira growled the name at Arthas, fixing his eyes on the bastard prince again rather than watching Thassarian hover over him.

Arthas was still grinning. Maybe that was the only expression he was capable of wearing anymore—rigor mortis at its most revolting.

“You were fools to welcome him into your midst,” Arthas said. “Dar’khan is happy to sell the lot of you out in exchange for a pat on the head. It's pathetic, even for an elf.”

Thassarian was still moving; his hand ran around to Koltira’s stomach and down along the muscled plane of it, soft and insistent, past his navel and—

Koltira jerked and let out a startled, strangled cry as Thassarian took him in hand. Lips framed by thick, wiry hair brushed the skin of his shoulder, an automatic, lifeless gesture. Koltira willed away the heat that flashed through his skin at the contact. This wasn't Thassarian anymore.

Teeth grazed his skin, sending gooseflesh racing along the back of Koltira’s neck. Whatever the human had become, he still had Thassarian’s memories. That could be damning enough.

Arthas laughed again. “It looks like Thassarian didn't have anything to worry about, after all. If you react this way to him even now, I can't imagine you're anywhere as lascivious as the rest of your kind.”

That stung. Old conversations and arguments bubbled to the surface of Koltira’s mind, adding another layer to his torment as teeth grazed his shoulder. Thassarian thumbed the tip of his cock, dragging another choked noise from his throat. Revulsion, not arousal. There was nothing pleasurable about this.

“What's the matter, elf?" Arthas asked. "Not enough trees around for your liking?”

Koltira closed his eyes, clenched his teeth as Thassarian made another pass with his thumb, tried to ignore the bastard prince altogether. Damn Arthas. Damn him. Damn him…

Arthas grinned down at the scene before him. He had little sexual interest in the display—but subjecting this little elf to such degradation was nearly sweet enough to warm his frosted heart. He was eager to see the pest utterly broken, tortured in place of all the elves who still dared to interfere with the Scourge.

It helped a great deal that Koltira was blond. It made him a fitting surrogate in more ways than he could fathom.

“Thassarian.” Arthas gave a slight jerk of his chin; his eyes locked with Koltira’s as he spoke. “He isn't enjoying himself. Fix that.”

Thassarian leaned forward, eyes following the ruined line of Koltira’s ear as he brought his mouth against its outer edge. The man's lips parted; his pale tongue flicked out between them and grazed the edge of a deep gouge in the cartilage, the motion gentle, exploratory.

Koltira went rigid; a high, thin keen stole through his teeth as his glowing eyes snapped open and rolled back in his head. The elf's arms shook, and a thin layer of sweat began to gleam across his forehead. Another pass of Thassarian’s tongue drew a louder, longer sound from Koltira, this one more along the lines of a low whine.

Interesting.

“Your ears become more ridiculous by the moment,” Arthas sneered. “Now I see why cutting them is torment for your kind. How do your civilians withstand piercing theirs when their warriors come undone at the slightest touch?”

Koltira didn't answer him, though the next sound Thassarian coaxed from him sounded like an honest attempt at speech.

Thassarian ripped a cry from Koltira with a grazing nip at his earlobe, and then the hand between the elf's thighs began to move. The hard muscles in Thassarian’s arm rolled under his skin as he began to slowly stroke Koltira off, and Arthas watched with a leer as Koltira ground against the contact, twisting his hips down to angle himself deeper into Thassarian’s hand.

“That didn't take much, did it?” Arthas commented. “So much for the pride of the quel’dorei. Perhaps if I had sent my death knights to seduce your leaders, there would have been no need for this war.”

Again Koltira attempted to answer; he was barely able to stammer out the first syllable before Thassarian delivered a harder nip to the cusp of his ear and with it seemed to unravel the elf all over again. His hand moved gradually faster along Koltira’s length, and in return the boy was becoming increasingly shameless, as though his first whimper had been enough to wipe out all thought of dignity or disgust.

How like an elf: Driven mad by the simplest misplaced touch.

“It looks like I was mistaken,” the champion commented as Koltira let his head drop between his arms. “You're not a cat at all, are you, elf? You're in a far lower class than any lynx. _They_ don't carry on like half-starved kittens the moment someone gives them a scratch behind the ears.”

Koltira shuddered as Thassarian sucked at the skin of his shoulder, but with his ears out of the man's reach he seemed to be regaining some measure of control. Still fighting, even when his own body betrayed him. Bull-headed whelp.

“This means nothing,” Koltira hissed. He didn't raise his head—one of the few intelligent decisions he'd made all day. His arms trembled again as Thassarian dug his teeth into the elf's shoulder. “You've made him… just another tool…”

Arthas snorted. “I have seen his memories, elf. I have watched your sordid romps. I've heard how he used to make you carry on like the animal you are. I've already seen some of it here,” he added, leaning forward again as the elf audibly swallowed down another whine. “You can't lie to me, _elf._ And I doubt you can lie to yourself for much longer.”

“Damn you,” Koltira spat. Another hard shudder rolled through him.

He tried not to focus on the hand between his legs; he tried to ignore the lips and teeth and tongue that traced patterns along his skin. He tried to tell himself that this was not Thassarian, these were not Thassarian’s hands. This was wrong. It was sick and vile and twisted, and the Thassarian he had known would have hated him for coming undone so easily.

“Koltira.”

The ranger's eyes snapped open, staring down the length of his body.

That had not been Arthas’ voice.

He felt numb again, and yet every nerve shrieked as he felt the lips against his shoulder move: “Koltira,” Thassarian whispered, and his voice was the same even behind the hollow echo he had gained in undeath, low and rasping and quiet—but not soft. Never soft. Not Thassarian’s…

Koltira choked on a sound that might have become a sob. His arms would have buckled and thrown him forward had the rotted hands Arthas had summoned not been there to keep him upright. The hand Thassarian had wrapped around him stopped, flattened, slid down to cup his sack.

“You need to relax,” Thassarian told him, and there it was, that familiar, odd tone that made his words a command and a request all at once. His fingers dug gently into Koltira’s flesh, massaging him and pushing another moan from his throat.

Lips and bristle brushed the nape of his neck. Koltira trembled. His eyes stung behind their lids as he closed them again to the sight of what was happening. He would pray for oblivion if there were gods left to pray to. Was there a god of undeath? Would it answer him if it existed? Would it be merciful, and grant him deafness or mindlessness?

The hand at his penis moved again, sliding up along his shaft and then beyond it to rest against the flat of his lower abdomen. Teeth grazed the skin of Koltira’s neck.

“Relax,” Thassarian urged again. His breath was cold; Koltira tried to tell himself that was the only reason his words raised gooseflesh along his spine.

The skeletal hands around Koltira’s arms retreated; Thassarian pulled him back before the elf could lower himself onto his elbows, then pushed both of them upright so that Koltira was bare before Arthas, bringing his free hand around to rest against the elf's chest. Icy tendrils of magic wrapped around Koltira’s arms, keeping them down at his sides so that he couldn't reach up to try to fight Thassarian off. He tried anyway, his arms straining hard against their smoky, blue-black bindings—to no avail. His skin bruised beneath the cords, until at a twitch of Arthas’ index finger the chill became a stabbing pain that didn't ease until Koltira relaxed.

There was another nip at the elf’s shoulder, hard enough this time to register as pressure rather than an edged caress. The hand at his chest slid upwards, hovering just near enough that the rough skin of Thassarian’s palm skimmed Koltira’s flesh and sent little veins of heat racing just beneath the surface. Koltira closed his eyes and brought his teeth together again to stop his jaw from the tiny shivers it had developed.

“By the grave, you really are hairless.” Arthas’ laugh cut through Koltira’s haze like a shard of ice. “Be honest, elf: Do the stereotypes about your kind only strike a nerve because they're accurate?”

Koltira’s lips twisted in the beginnings of a snarl, but Thassarian’s hand reached his throat before he could respond. The human applied just enough pressure, just deliberately enough for the gesture to come across as a warning, and Koltira silenced himself and fell still in response.

“Wait. My mistake.” Arthas laughed again. If he was owning up to it, clearly the mistake had been an intentional one. “You're not so hairless down below the belt, are you? I suppose that makes you only half as womanly as they say.”

Another growl began to build up in Koltira’s throat, and immediately Thassarian’s grip tightened again, this time more sharply than before. He almost wished Thassarian would just kill him and be done with it already—crush his windpipe, snap his neck, use some foul bit of magic to twist Koltira as he had been twisted. Anything to end this torment and the humiliation that came with it.

Death didn't come. Instead, the moment Koltira fell silent, Thassarian’s grip relaxed; a moment later his hand slid up along the length of Koltira’s throat, stopping only once it reached the elf's chin. Koltira struggled as his head was tipped back, but Thassarian was strong enough now that he hardly seemed to notice his resistance. Koltira felt the muscles in his neck strain and stiffen as the back of his head was forced to meet Thassarian’s shoulder.

He fell still again as Thassarian latched onto the side of his neck, scraping at it with his teeth before sucking hard enough to elicit a flash of dull pain. A low whine rattled through Koltira’s chest. His arms tightened, tried to pull up—and could not. The magic binding them held firm.

“This will be easier if you relax,” Thassarian whispered, and the hiss of his breath across Koltira’s throat was sepulchral, cold and dry where it ought to be warm and damp. Koltira sought distraction in grim curiosity, wondering whether Thassarian’s insides were dry like those of the troll mummies he had once helped destroy. The thought swiftly turned into a sharp reminder that this dead thing had been _Thassarian_ , warm, lively Thassarian who laughed too loud and had no idea how to use a bow or step softly across the forest floor…

His throat ached with the sob he bit back. The memories hurt far worse.

Thassarian’s hands were roaming again; the one at Koltira’s girth released him and slid upwards along his stomach, and the one at the ranger's throat relaxed, pulled back to draw cold fingers along the skin there.

Koltira’s eyes stung as they slid closed again; he refused to acknowledge the source of the burn, save to resolve not to allow Arthas to see it. The darkness behind his eyelids was safer, anyway. It was easier here to pretend this was a good thing—easier to imagine he and Thassarian were somewhere safe and alone, that Thassarian’s hands were cold from the autumnal air outside, that this was a time and place far removed from the Scourge and their mad prince.

The ache didn't subside; the horror refused to stop gnawing at his lungs. But at least the razor edge of the third, nameless thing that gathered like slaughterhouse offal in his stomach was dulled somewhat. At least the stench of it, so much like rotted fruit and frost-killed foliage, didn't reach him anymore.

Arthas narrowed his eyes as Koltira visibly seemed to calm himself; the change was slow and infinitesimal, but that he could mark it at all annoyed the Scourge champion. He wanted this overgrown vermin to _suffer_ , damn it.

His eyes flicked to Thassarian. Clearly the man needed a little more incentive to keep his elf's attention where it belonged.

Arthas forced himself into Thassarian’s psyche with little effort and found the death knight's mind beginning to wander from the task he had set, towards dim memories that Arthas had dragged forward into clarity hours before. It would have taken little effort to bring Thassarian back under control, but in his ire Arthas chose instead to tear at his will the way one might drag down the lead rope on an unruly horse. That alone seemed to cause Thassarian a moment's discomfort, for his hands twitched against Koltira’s skin as though he had just been burned. It wasn’t nearly enough punishment.

The next bit of magic Arthas sent to assault Thassarian was softer, more delicate in comparison to the icy sharpness of necromancy, and the second it touched Thassarian the death knight spasmed with a coarse, guttural snarl.

The living, in their hubris, believed healing magic beyond the reach of the undead. It was an understandable mistake to make; generally only the living cultists could stand to use any at all, and then it was either to put the undead back together again or keep a living prisoner alive and well for their next round of torment. No prisoners ever escaped the Scourge, and _surely_ only necromancy could maintain the reanimated masses, or so the mortal world believed. So too did most believe healing magic to be holy work; Arthas, who remembered his earliest studies as a paladin, was very well aware that healing did not require the Light or any other feeble deity to smile upon the caster in order for the magic to work. All anyone needed to cast a successful restorative spell, for example, was a decent understanding of the physiology of their patient and the power to cast the spell at all.

Arthas watched on in disdain as Thassarian writhed under the effects of the spell; every nerve in the man's body was being roused from its reanimation, cleansed and slowly being given life again even as the rest of his body remained dead and cold. From the looks of things, the process was an excruciating one, every bit as unnatural as undeath itself. Thassarian’s body had gone rigid with the pain of it, his arms drawing down tight against Koltira in a way that almost made it look like he was trying to _protect_ the elf.

His suffering was enough to get through to Koltira, and the ranger's eyes shot open again as another growl ripped from Thassarian’s throat.

“Do I have your attention now, elf?” Arthas sneered. He sent another brush of restorative magic at Thassarian and managed to draw a cry from the man.

Koltira flinched at the sound and turned his head as far as he could manage, trying to get a look at what was being done to Thassarian. What he saw was enough to drain the color from the elf's cheeks and send him hurtling forward against his bindings, his face twisted with rage as he bared his teeth at Arthas.

“How predictable.” Arthas stopped the healing spell, then reversed its work with a breath of necromancy. Thassarian’s next cry was louder and harsher, and this time when his hands convulsed against Koltira his fingernails ended up drawing livid red lines in the elf's skin.

“Your concern for him makes you weak, Koltira,” Arthas continued. He lifted his chin at the elf's wordless growl and said, “Do you think he would hesitate to feed you your own entrails, if I ordered him to? Thassarian has been freed from the softness of mortality; his only desire now is to slake his bloodlust in whatever ways I allow.”

“Then why torture him, too?” Koltira challenged. His eyes burned with renewed hatred. “What did your ‘mindless slave’ do that wasn't exactly as you commanded, pig?”

Arthas smiled. Thassarian had gone still again, his body once more wholly dead and reanimated. His mind was still firmly under Arthas’ control, but the pain he had endured had sparked a surge of rage in Thassarian, and the death knight visibly shook with it as Arthas held him in check.

“Careful, Koltira,” Arthas warned. “You're already in over your head. You might want to watch your mouth before it digs you even deeper.”

Koltira spat again, and this time the projectile landed squarely on Arthas’ foot.

“Nether take you,” Koltira hissed.

Arthas lifted an eyebrow and eyed the spray of spittle across his boot; his lip curled as he raised his gaze and locked eyes again with the elf.

“That was a mistake,” he said softly.

Directing Thassarian's fury towards the elf was an effortless thing with the death knight so completely under his control. Arthas allowed a hard grin to cross his features as Koltira was unceremoniously slammed face-down against the ground; it was fortunate for the elf that Arthas chose to unravel the magic binding his arms at the same moment, because otherwise they would have been snapped like bits of dry wood.

Thassarian planted a hand down against the back of Koltira’s head, keeping the elf pinned as he called up another gathering of skeletal arms to clutch and wrap about Koltira’s arms and torso. More arms came up under the elf's waist, pushing his lower half up so that he remained raised on his knees.

Once Koltira was secure, Thassarian stood and began mechanically stripping down, keeping his scowl locked on the now struggling elf. The death knight wasn't erect, though that was hardly surprising after his brief moment of free will. Neither was it anything that could not again be overcome through the use of a simple spell. Arousal and fear, after all, both depended upon hormones stemming from the same portion of the brain; if Arthas could master an entire mind, he could master pieces of it with even greater ease.

Thassarian responded to the new spell with an immediacy that was all the more off-putting for the fact that the man bodily twitched and let out a sharp, rasping grunt in response. But at least the spell had in fact served its intended purpose; Thassarian was fully engorged now, and hit his knees behind Koltira with another animal growl.

“You're out of time, Koltira.” Arthas sat back again with a smirk as the elf's struggles grew more frantic. “And I've run out of patience with you. It's time you learned your place.”

He watched for a moment longer as Koltira writhed against the rotted hands that pinned him, desperately attempting to squirm forward and away from Thassarian as the death knight grasped him at the hips. This wasn't a bad look for the former ranger, Arthas mused. Laid bare and helpless as he was, with his long ears ruined and hair gore-caked and fanned around his shoulders… if the soldiers of the Scourge had turned out to have retained any carnal needs, the elf would have made a decent brothel whore.

Arthas lifted one hand and pressed his thumb and fingertips together, not needing to in order to control Thassarian but choosing to because it made Koltira turn an even paler shade of white, made his eyes seem to glow just a bit brighter with abject horror.

Arthas waited for a moment, his hand poised level with his jawline as he turned his gaze to Thassarian. The man was looking down at Koltira with the look of a ferociously hungry wolf, his teeth bared and gleaming in the dim light. If he noticed—or cared—that Koltira had begun trembling beneath him, he gave no sign of it.

Arthas snapped his fingers, and Thassarian rammed forward.


	3. Match

The first slam of his cock into Koltira’s ass came with a tearing of flesh and a long, piercing shriek from the elf, who went rigid as the pain rocketed through him. Three fingernails frayed and snapped as the ranger clawed uselessly at the frost-hardened ground beneath his hands. From where Thassarian knelt, he could see blood well up and dribble to the ground from two of Koltira’s fingertips; those nails had broken well past their beds.

Thassarian went still for a moment, fully sheathed in Koltira as he watched and waited for the elf to calm down… and by tiny increments, he did, although the muscles through Koltira’s back, glutes, and thighs maintained their spasmodic quivering long after he stopped screaming. Neither did the elf ever go completely silent; instead he maintained a broken stream of gradually quieter grunts and whimpers as the pain slowly began to fade from his lower body.

_Poor little elf._

Thassarian could not react to the voice that intruded upon his thoughts, not even as his mind raged impotently against it. His body remained poised and still in spite of his fury.

 _I wonder which is worse,_ Arthas continued. _The physical pain? Or the horror of being raped by his undead lover?_

Koltira whined beneath him, visibly becoming uneasy as the stillness dragged on. The lean muscles in his arms strained and trembled as he made another futile attempt to distance himself from Thassarian.

Perched on his skeleton throne, Arthas chuckled at the sight before him, and his presence in Thassarian's head forced the death knight to feel exactly how amused the fallen prince truly was, and to understand exactly _why_ he found the image so entertaining.

 _Poor Koltira,_ Arthas said again; his voice as it sounded in Thassarian's mind was low and menacing, a constant whisper that echoed and lingered far longer than it would in any cave or hollow. _Not so mouthy now, is he? If only he'd remembered his manners a bit earlier; I might have been inclined to give him a more painless death if he had kept his mouth shut._

Thassarian's body moved without him, swept out of his control again so that Thassarian could do nothing but watch as he pulled back and nearly freed himself of Koltira, only to slam forward again and rip another shriek from the elf. Blood trickled down the insides of Koltira’s thighs and stained Thassarian's cock as he thrust a few more times into the screaming man beneath him. The friction was uncomfortable for Thassarian as well, and after a while he felt himself pull out and come to another stop—again outside of his control.

“I suggest you find something to lubricate yourself with, Thassarian.” Arthas spoke aloud this time, and ridiculously enough the man almost sounded _bored_. “I don't think Koltira appreciates your handling of him at the moment.”

Koltira shuddered under Thassarian's hands and stammered unintelligibly for a moment in a high, breathless rasp. Sweat ran in little streams along the elf's back and sides, hurried about by his continued trembling. Thassarian had enough control of himself to tighten his grip on Koltira, his fingers drawing down slightly against the elf's skin. Neither Koltira nor Arthas seemed to notice the gesture; Thassarian was sure both of them had.

“Babbling now, Koltira?” Arthas sneered. “How pathetic. You were in better shape after Brennan was done with you. This can't be worse than having your knees shattered.”

Thassarian didn't have enough control to lift Koltira from the ground, and neither did Arthas seem inclined to let him do so. The death knight knew better than to try it anyway.

Koltira’s hard, shaking breaths paused briefly, then started up again with a hard exhalation; he must have swallowed in an attempt to calm himself down.

When the elf spoke, it was to reel off a quick line in Thalassian.

“Feed yourself to your own ghouls,” Koltira told Arthas. His voice was quiet and thin, but the edges of each word sharpened with what spite he could muster. He must know Arthas didn't understand a word of Thalassian, which made his insult twofold. A corner of Thassarian's mouth twitched at the thought.

Arthas snorted and said, “Fine, then, keep speaking gibberish. When you're ready to use Common like a decent creature, we'll listen.”

Thassarian's body moved without him again, leaning forward across Koltira’s back as one hand slid up to grip the underside of the elf's chin and turn his head to one side. Koltira’s matted hair slid away from his shoulder at the motion, laying bare the large, ugly bruise blossoming across the flesh there. That arm had been dislocated recently.

Koltira shuddered beneath him as Thassarian pressed his lips to that shoulder; the pressure against Thassarian's hand increased as the elf strained against his grip, clearly attempting to shift his head back around and protect the injured area as best he could. The futility of it left a bitter taste in Thassarian's mouth as his jaws parted of their own accord.

It was odd, the way his body behaved in response to Arthas’ will. This wasn't the first time Thassarian had been allowed enough freedom to watch as he was made to act as the fallen prince required; then, as now, the control Arthas had over him was so complete that each movement felt as natural as if Thassarian was the one guiding them.

He didn't know how Arthas managed to force his body to act as it had in better days—as it would if Thassarian were the one guiding it. Now, as his teeth began to dig into Koltira’s skin, he sorely wished he had some idea.

The bite was slow enough that there was no sudden slice as the top layer of flesh gave way; only Koltira’s increasingly agonized snarls and the hot rush of blood in Thassarian's mouth let him know how deeply the injury had gone. Should Koltira’s blood be so warm? It sat like a mouthful of molten copper against his tongue as he pulled away. Scarlet ran in a wide stream over Koltira’s shoulder to pool in the dirt beneath him.

The bite was a deep one, and Koltira trembled with the shock of it. It was an injury that should have killed the elf by now; Thassarian was certain he had felt the artery come undone, but the amount of blood being lost was too little for that. It took him a second longer to notice the faint, bluish tint surrounding the edges of the bite and understand what was happening.

Arthas and his damned magic.

Thassarian felt the fallen prince starting to intrude again and acted on his own rather than endure another round of punishment.

Magic had never been Thassarian's strong suit in life; even in undeath, he preferred to use his runeblade and hands to dispatch his victims. It made for swifter kills than many of the spells employed by the Scourge—and drowning his enemies in plague or causing their blood to erupt from their pores simply didn't appeal to Thassarian. They were already doomed; he couldn't see the point in prolonging the inevitable.

But he _did_ possess Scourge magic, now, and had been trained in its use. For once, he found himself glad that his preferences had been ignored during his instruction; the spells he needed now would have been impossible to weave had he been given his way.

The first and simpler of the two removed the clotting agents from Koltira’s blood, ensuring that it wouldn't congeal. He needed it to remain fluid, revolting as the thought was. As the entire situation was.

There was a noticeable change in the flow of blood from Koltira’s shoulder once the spell took effect. It ran more fluidly along his skin now, robbed of the natural processes that had caused it to dry so rapidly before. Koltira didn't seem to notice the difference, though he still shook so badly that Thassarian doubted anything short of another traumatic injury would catch his attention at the moment. He was about to find out, in any case.

The next step involved more complicated magic, and Thassarian hadn't understood its applicability in combat until he had used it to completely drain an opposing soldier's sword arm of blood, rendering it useless. Now he had enough practice with it to understand exactly how devastating it could be to harness a man's blood and force it to flow against its natural current—or, in this case, gravity.

Rather than watch the effects of his own spell, Thassarian chose to turn his gaze to Koltira’s face for the first time since the elf had been herded in from the torture pit. Some matted hair still hid the Koltira's jaw and mouth, but the rest—the hollows under his visible eye, the wretched pallor across his cheeks, the hard-lined shadow just below his cheekbone that gave away how tightly he was clenching his teeth—these were all in clear view. One long eyebrow swept high into the air, its split ends dyed bright red and glued together into a spike. Its mate was nowhere to be seen, likely crushed between the ground and the side of Koltira’s head.

A thousand flecks of memory told Thassarian that mashed eyebrow was probably uncomfortable for the elf. Common sense reminded him that it wasn't the worst thing the ranger had to endure at the moment.

Bound by Thassarian's second spell, the blood still flowing from Koltira’s shoulder stopped just outside the injury; within seconds a fist-sized puddle had formed against his skin, raised and gently rippling as though it lay in a self-sustained basin on the ground. It took only the briefest mental nudge for that puddle to start moving again, trickling up along the elf's back in a thin, rapidly cooling stream.

Koltira twitched as the stream crested his ass; the tiniest sliver of sky-blue light along his eyelids betrayed him as he stole a glance up at Thassarian. There came the slightest questioning set to the deep lines around the elf's eye—and then the blood reached its mark, and the sliver of light widened so that the pupil of Koltira's eye became more easily discernable.

Thassarian turned his attention downward, moving forward so that his cock was coated with blood as well. One hand gripped Koltira's hip again; the other shifted to bear down against the nape of the elf's neck as Thassarian lined up and thrust into him.

The noise Koltira let out this time was like a warbling yowl, a wordless outcry as realization finally struck the elf. The muscles along his arms and shoulders writhed as he again tried to pull against the withered hands that pinned him; another nail broke against a rock embedded in the ground.

Koltira struggled uselessly beneath his tormentor. His hands slipped in his own blood as he clawed at the frozen earth, and pain seared through his skin as his fingers were dragged against rocks and ice.

He tried to latch onto that pain to distract himself from the feel of blood running the length of his spine. It didn't itch; it didn't tickle. He didn't know how to name the sensation, only that he wanted desperately to be rid of it.

Blood. His _blood…_

There was laughter again above him. Koltira readily let it draw him from his horror even as his body tensed in response to it.

“Still not happy, Koltira?” Arthas asked. “And after all the trouble Thassarian's taken to make you comfortable. I wouldn't have thought someone this finicky would be his type.”

Koltira twisted his head around to scowl up at Arthas as well as he could. He didn't dare speak; his body was being rocked hard enough that he feared biting through his tongue if he tried.

The hand at the back of his neck tightened, pulling at the fine strands near his hairline as those cold, calloused fingers dug down against his skin. Koltira tried to focus on that; it wasn't so obviously a repetitive force, and it didn't bring pain or heat. It was safer than what was happening elsewhere, and Koltira had to latch onto whatever distractions he could find.

The rough handling was no such distraction; it was only slightly rougher than their… than it had been in another lifetime. Than it had been before, when Koltira had been too wild and Thassarian too unused to elves to allow either to behave with much care or tenderness. Their first time had left both a bruised and bloody mess; it had taken the two of them months to settle into a rhythm that hadn't left them looking as though they had started out throwing punches.

Thassarian's next forward thrust came in time with Koltira's uninvited memories, and the combination sent heat blossoming through the elf's lower half like a cloud of blood billowing in water. Koltira choked on a strangled mewl and laid the side of his head back against the ground, squeezing his eyes shut as Arthas laughed again. Listening to the human pig’s amusement wasn't helping anymore; the sound of it was weaker now than the sensation that was prickling outward through Koltira's legs and upper torso and made more intense with Thassarian's every movement.

Another thrust shoved Koltira forward hard enough that his cheek split against the ground with a sudden flare of pain. The elf hissed and ground his head harder against the earth, angling until his cheekbone dug sharply against a stone. Thassarian's next thrust provided enough power to tear a jagged gash in that cheek, and Koltira pressed harder towards the pain even as he gritted his teeth against it and his eyes watered from it. This was more intense than the dull ache lower down and easier to focus his mind on for its location. It even helped shock him away from the pressure building in his groin for a few precious moments.

He was going to have scars to show for this, surely, but he was well beyond the point of caring anymore. He was going to rot anyway; what did it matter if his face was mutilated before frost and black magic could chew away at it? In some perverse sense, it almost felt like spiting undeath itself to ruin himself before it took hold of him.

Blood had begun to pool beneath his left eye when Thassarian shifted again. Koltira went rigid as he felt the cold, muscled expanse of the man's stomach and chest lever down against his back; the hand at the back of his neck shifted around to clutch the side of it firmly enough to keep Koltira still as Thassarian brought his mouth level with Koltira's injured shoulder again. Koltira tensed, expecting—hoping—to feel teeth sink into his flesh again. When instead he felt the slick, gentle pressure of pursed lips against the edge of his wound, the pain of it was a thousand times worse.

“You'll ruin your face that way,” Thassarian told him. The wiry hair surrounding his mouth moved against Koltira's shoulder as he spoke, causing the bite there to itch relentlessly. It wasn't enough to dull the ache his words dragged forth.

The thrusting didn't stop, and the new angle meant that the heat each movement fueled was greater now, more insistent, more impossible to resist or ignore. Koltira gritted his teeth until they rang with pressure and drew his tongue hard against the back of his mouth, seeking to choke the whines and moans he could feel bubbling up beyond his control. This had the added effect of cutting off his air, and the resultant tension in his abdomen only heightened again the effect Thassarian's assault was having on him.

“Having trouble, elf?” Arthas. The bastard’s words rippled with the chuckle behind them. “Careful. You wouldn't want to start _enjoying_ this, would you?”

Something cold gnawed at Koltira's sides. _He knew._ The frigid pig _knew_.

Koltira jerked his head hard towards the sharp rock beneath his cheek, tearing another searing, distracting line in his face—and then Thassarian shifted the hand at his neck again, swept it around to his collarbones to heft Koltira away from his distraction. The rotted arms pinning Koltira loosened, shifted, let the elf be braced on his elbows before becoming like iron once more.

The angle had shifted again. The ache and the heat intensified in response.

“Don't,” Thassarian whispered against the base of his neck. His beard and mustache rasped against Koltira's skin, sending heat flaring through the elf's shoulder until the pain of the bite mark was nearly lost in it.

A sound broke from Koltira's throat—a stumbling sob, a choking moan, he wasn't sure which, wasn't coherent enough to identify it properly. It didn't matter; he had responded either way. He had given a clear indication that he was enjoying this. He was _enjoying_ it, in spite of the all-encompassing horror that should still freeze his blood and the heavy, dragging grief that dug into him like dull claws.

More bristling kisses trailed from his neck along his shoulder, gentling excruciatingly where they pressed against the bite. Koltira made a miserable attempt at swallowing back another sob and lowered his head. His nails pierced his palms as he clenched his fists; if Thassarian noticed this, he gave no sign of it.

The hand at his collarbones moved lower; before Koltira could lower himself again, more bony hands came up against his chest, pressing upwards so that he remained upright as Thassarian trailed his own hand down to the muscled plane of Koltira's stomach. Calloused fingers massaged the skin there; the hard muscles of Thassarian's arm shifted against Koltira’s skin as the elf was held firm against the death knight. There was no stifling the strangled noise Koltira made this time.

“Easy.” Thassarian drew the word out into a low, rumbling note that echoed through Koltira's flesh. The hand at his stomach felt possessive; the arm pinning him to the human became an anchor rather than a cage. No magic at work here—only memories sweeping through the horror as Koltira's subconscious mind raced to spare him from some fraction, at least, of his suffering.

This was familiar. And it would be, with Arthas as aware as he now claimed to be of their history together. Surely Thassarian's memories of their first coupling had been the final nail in the coffin.

Koltira shrank from the reminder with a rattling gasp. Acknowledging the truth of this moment was too much like falling stomach-down onto a large boulder. It would be simpler if he could stop caring. It would end sooner if he could pretend, just for a little while, that this was not the atrocity it was.

The hand at his stomach slid lower and grasped Koltira's cock again as the speed of Thassarian’s thrusts began to increase. Koltira gave a hoarse moan and tried to let himself fold into the pleasure building up in his traitorous body. It would be easier. It wouldn't hurt so much if he could only let himself forget—

The earth around his knees broke apart, and Koltira jerked forward with a startled shout as more withered hands trailed up the insides of his thighs, leaving his skin slicked with fetid scraps of flesh as they stroked and prodded their way towards his groin. Thassarian didn't stop thrusting, didn't stop stroking him off, but the moment was broken again, sharp and cold and far too real. Koltira's latest distraction was gone.

Above him, Arthas laughed and said, “Did you forget where you were, elf? Let me remind you.”

The hands at his thighs had reached the juncture between his sack and anus, and Koltira yelped and tried with renewed vigor to drag himself away as a thumb or finger that was more bone than decaying flesh traced a slow, gentle line between the two. His cock ached; his vision swam dangerously for a moment before another wave of nausea dragged him back from his arousal again and he gagged audibly.

“Careful,” Thassarian murmured. The man tightened his grip on Koltira's cock, squeezing a point between the glans and shaft so that the wretched pressure in his groin built to a truly painful throb, robbed for the moment of its only outlet.

What could he do? His mind scrambled, scattered with a wave of panic. Horror and humiliation warred with each other with each gasp and whine and moan Thassarian and the mummified hands managed to draw from him. He wanted to escape into the pleasure; he wanted the strength to break free of his bindings and turn his fury on Thassarian or Arthas. He couldn't choose between them. Both were atrocious. Both were tempting, so tempting, so simple, so likely to end with his death—blessed, merciful death.

The pressure at his cock went away; Thassarian’s hand stroked him again as the thrusts grew in force and the fetid hand slipped forward to cup the elf's balls. A wailing sob spilled from his throat, harsh and long, loud enough that it nearly drowned out another laugh from Arthas.

“Are you that close, elf?” The pig was laughing between every word, laughing through them, laughing with them, _laughing, laughing, laughing._

Lips brushed Koltira's ear; breath danced across the ruined edge as Thassarian thrust and stroked and spoke: “You're close, Koltira. Breathe.”

He wanted to die. He was ready to die. Die and become a mindless thrall, never to think or feel again, never to remember, never to wish to. Death, sweet death, soft death, silent and simple and painless, surely, surely it would be painless.

“Nearly there.”

The thrusting grew harder—the hand moved faster—the slime and rotting flesh traveled farther and the pleasure outraced every one of them, consumed them all, lapped and sucked and chewed at him as he trembled against the frozen earth.

He needed a distraction. He needed to be away from this. He must. He must. The thrusting grew stronger and he noticed. The hand wrung cries from him and he heard them. The slime swallowed him and he felt it.

They had been taught, hadn't they, Koltira and his fellow novices? They had been taught to find distractions when faced with torture. Surely they had been taught. Halduron wouldn't send them out unprepared. He knew. He must have taught them. He must have known.

He sucked in a breath just before the heat rose up and tore away the last of him.

Thassarian tucked his face against the side of Koltira's neck as the elf gave a warbling cry and finally came across the ground. A few thrusts more and Thassarian followed suit, spilling himself inside the elf with a savage growl.

Koltira had gone limp in his restraints by the time Thassarian's vision cleared. He trembled feebly as Thassarian pulled out, but now these were the spasmodic, fleshy quivers of an overtaxed body, not the bone-deep tremors of strain or terror. The whimper Koltira let out as Thassarian backed away and off of him was breathless and quiet, as though even making such a sound drained the elf of more energy than he had to spare.

The rotted hands surrounding Koltira held him for a while longer, keeping him presented before Arthas as Thassarian reversed the spells still coursing through Koltira's blood. The champion's amusement was a palpable thing that choked the air like smoke even before he began to chuckle.

“Well, Koltira?” Arthas’ tone almost seemed to soften over the name. “You're not much of an elf anymore, are you? We've gone and made a dog out of you.”

Thassarian kept his features steady as the silence stretched out unbroken through the tent. It took the space of one slow, unnecessary breath before the stillness shattered around Koltira with a sharp jerk of the elf's torso, accompanied by the hiss of a breath drawn hard through his teeth.

Thassarian stood and backed one step away as Koltira's trembling grew sharper, more jagged. His absence seemed to be a trigger; the moment he was clear of the elf, Koltira went limp again and broke his silence with a long, low sob.

For a moment, the only sound was that of Koltira's quiet weeping as he knelt—naked, utterly humiliated, bound by the rotted arms of the civilians and rangers the Scourge had slain and buried here en masse—at the foot of the dais. Dripping soon followed, blood and tears falling from the broken man to splatter against the ruined earth.

If there was poetry in the image, it was lost in the sudden fury that gripped Thassarian like the talons of some beast of flame and slag. White haze bordered his field of vision, denser and brighter with each new sound Koltira made. He shook with the effort it took to restrain himself. If Arthas noticed…

The rotted arms unwound themselves and retreated into the earth, and in their absence Koltira could only hold himself upright for a moment before appearing to lose all strength and pitching forward to collapse gracelessly onto his stomach. He only just managed to keep from banging his head against the dais as he fell, and made no attempt to rise again once he had. Instead he simply continued weeping where he lay, his arms propping him partway against the dais, his legs sprawled uselessly behind him.

This was a more intolerable scene than any before it. Thassarian had to work now to keep his jaw from tightening as he raised his gaze to see Arthas’ reaction.

The Scourge champion lounged in his skeleton throne, his legs splayed casually, his cheek propped on one fist and a grin playing across his features as he watched Koltira shudder against the dais. Clearly he found the scene immensely entertaining.

The haze around Thassarian's vision gnawed its way inward; the shaking in his hands intensified, traveled up along his arms. Thought it was funny, did he?

“Death would be easier, wouldn't it, elf?” Arthas asked, no longer bothering to hide the laughter in his voice. “You wouldn't suffer so much if you were one of us. Nothing would matter to you enough to cause any of this unnecessary heartbreak.”

Koltira gave a coughing wail and jerked away from Arthas as though his words had been blows. It was nearly enough to cause Thassarian to lose the battle to remain where he stood.

Arthas shifted, pulling his feet in and bracing his elbows across his knees as he leaned towards Koltira and continued, “You should give up, Koltira. You're already damned; you might as well make the most of it.”

Koltira’s sobbing had grown softer, and now it took on a despairing note that dragged through Thassarian's innards like a dull blade. As Thassarian watched on in his mounting fury, the elf slowly began to lean forward again, drawn in by Arthas’ lies.

The fallen prince smelled the easy victory before him, and his grin grew savage as he said, “Submit, Koltira. Beg me for the mercy of the grave, and you will have it.”

A low sound escaped Thassarian to cut across the end of his declaration—scarcely more than a seething hiss, but loud enough to startle a flinch from Koltira and snap Arthas’ attention towards the source.

“Something you'd like to add, Thassarian?” Thunder brewed in Arthas’ eyes as he straightened on his throne and stared Thassarian down. Thassarian said nothing in response, but met his gaze with open hatred.

The world went red as agony shredded through Thassarian. Dimly he registered his knees connecting with the ground; less so did he hear the sound of his own screaming. There was no tympanic roar in his ears to drown out his surroundings—his blood had flown only sluggishly in the last several months, and not even this mindless torment could change that.

A hard kick buckled his ribs and sent Thassarian tumbling to the ground as Arthas’ magic withdrew again. The champion stood over him now, face dark with contempt as Thassarian lay recovering beneath him.

“You're an even worse disappointment than your little elf,” Arthas sneered. “Have you forgotten who you serve, Thassarian?”

Thassarian snarled and rolled away and up onto his feet. He was ready when Arthas swept towards him—unarmed, a testament to the fallen prince's arrogance. Thassarian was sturdier in build and had years more experience than this whelp. His rage fueled him where Arthas had only the petty spite of a sore princeling.

The two collided, grappled, each landing solid blows to the other, both drawing blood that oozed in slow, blackened dribbles down their arms and faces. Hair snagged in clenched fists; a cheek was smashed, eyes blackened, teeth knocked loose. Arthas landed a kick to Thassarian's knee that nearly buckled the joint, and Thassarian was forced to roll to one side to absorb the shock.

He risked a glance away from the fight as he rose again. Koltira was no longer at the foot of the dais; he must have taken his chance and fled. Clever elf.

A fist connected with Thassarian's jaw, sending him staggering back. He expected the blow to his abdomen that followed, and the anticipation enabled his mind to remain clear even as he doubled over, the air driven from his lungs. Rather than stumble away from the fist in his gut, Thassarian grabbed the arm it was attached to and threw his weight down, dragging Arthas to the ground with him.

They tore at each other like a pair of beasts. Somewhere in the struggle Thassarian lost himself and used his teeth where his hands could not reach, ripping flesh from Arthas until he was knocked away with a blow to the side of his head.

Arthas broke free and stumbled to his feet as Thassarian reeled, cursing him in a voice distorted by the ringing in Thassarian's ears. Thassarian shook his head and rose to one knee as the world whirled dizzyingly around him.

Arthas jerked forward again—another attack. Thassarian snarled and threw himself forward, spading one hand and thrusting it forward as he closed with Arthas. There was enough strength and momentum behind the motion that Thassarian sank up to his elbow through the champion's abdomen; his hand tore through the other man's back, coated in gore.

It was the heat of his opponent's insides that shocked Thassarian from his rage.

The haze fled his vision entirely, and a sense of being drawn away from a moment of deep thought washed over Thassarian as the slender, nude body of his victim jerked and then sagged around his arm. The hands that scrabbled feebly at his arm were slim and limber; the tapered nails at the ends of their long fingers were frayed and newly broken, coated in a mix of dried blood and fresh ichor. His victim choked, and the blood that fell from the other man's mouth burned where it landed against Thassarian's skin.

Thassarian looked up into Koltira's face just as Arthas began to laugh.

“Did you really think you could ever stand a chance against me, Thassarian?” Arthas asked. The champion still lounged in the throne, unruffled and uninjured as he grinned at Thassarian. “You can't even tell reality from an illusion.”

Koltira crumbled, but Thassarian was already there to catch him and lower him carefully to the ground. Instinct screamed at him to remove his arm from Koltira's stomach, but training and battlefield experience kept it rooted in place as he tucked a knee under Koltira's shoulders and supported his head with his free hand. The elf would die either way; with Thassarian blocking the majority of the bleeding, he might at least be able to give Koltira a few minutes more of life and freedom from the hell that awaited him.

Koltira choked again, spraying blood across Thassarian's face. The elf's broken nails dug sharp lines into Thassarian's arm as his hands shifted again, still pushing uselessly at the limb. Thassarian watched on in silence as the arcane glow in Koltira's eyes slowly began to dim. A wide, ugly gash had been torn horizontally across the bridge of the elf's nose about halfway between his brow and nostrils; the blood welling from the wound ran down his cheeks like tears.

The elf shuddered, his hands spasming for a moment… and then, unbelievably, a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth as he swallowed back more blood. Thassarian frowned, but resisted the urge to say something to the dying man in favor of waiting to see what more would come.

Koltira visibly seemed to work at opening his mouth again, and for a moment his lips and tongue twitched as though he was attempting to speak. Another shudder rolled through him, and he stopped to clench his teeth and close his eyes until it passed. Thassarian could feel every movement of the elf's punctured diaphragm as Koltira struggled to draw breath enough to calm himself.

It took a while before the elf settled again, and his cheeks had hollowed and faded to a sickly pallor in that time. When he looked up at Thassarian, his eyes were visibly unfocused and had lost all but the faintest suggestion of their former gleam. Even still, the smile found its way back across Koltira's lips, though it was weaker now, just as his trembling was becoming weaker with each passing moment. Another, much shallower breath fluttered unevenly through his teeth; his hands lost what strength was left in them and slid down to rest around Thassarian's arm where it disappeared into his stomach.

Koltira mouthed something, the smile falling away entirely as his focus shifted. His lips trembled and the words were only vaguely formed across them, but Thassarian was relatively certain he knew what the elf was trying to say. Koltira had never been one to move his mouth much at all when he spoke softly.

_Well fought._

Koltira seemed to repeat the phrase at least twice as he struggled to be understood. At Thassarian's nod, Koltira jerked his mouth back into something resembling a smile, then stopped attempting to speak altogether and let his jaw fall slack.

His head lolled back against Thassarian's hand; his breathing hiked, growing so shallow and so rapid that the movements of his diaphragm against Thassarian's arm began to feel more like spasms than genuine contractions. The scent of life—a rancid stench to Thassarian now that he belonged to the Scourge—was swiftly beginning to fade from the elf, replaced in slow, small increments by the stale musk of death.

It had been a joke, Thassarian thought bitterly, whenever Koltira had claimed Thassarian would be the death of him. Perhaps Arthas had seen those memories, as well.

Koltira was still watching him when Thassarian turned his eyes away from the killing wound and back to the elf's face. The arcane glow had completely fled from his eyes, leaving the color of his irises bare for the first—and last—time. Thassarian had always thought they must be dark blue; he'd never expected them to instead be such a stormy shade of gray.

Koltira stared at him for a moment, unblinking, slowly relaxing away from the trembling that still periodically gripped his frame. Then he dipped his chin towards his chest—slowly, deliberately, never once breaking eye contact—and let himself relax entirely. He didn't try to speak. He didn't need to.

Thassarian shifted his grip, steadying Koltira as he ripped his arm free from the elf's gut in one fluid motion. Blood poured from the wound on both sides; Koltira’s gasp was drowned by the swell of blood that surged up through his throat to gush from his mouth. His eyes fluttered and rolled before jerking upwards until only the whites were visible.

Koltira shuddered for another moment—and then fell still. His body went utterly limp, a sudden, heavy weight in Thassarian's arms. His eyes hadn't quite closed before his death; the whites still showed through slits between his eyelids as Thassarian reached up and brushed a bloodied strand of hair from his face. His fingers brushed the wide, open cut across the elf's nose and came away streaked with scarlet.

Arthas snorted, shattering the silence so abruptly that Thassarian flinched at the sound.

“Touching, Thassarian. Really.” The champion's voice was dry as bone.

Thassarian blinked and looked up at Arthas. There was no rage anymore; the fire in his stomach was gone again, snuffed by the chill of his insides.

There was nothing, and that was all. Perhaps that should bother him. It didn't.

Arthas jerked his chin at Thassarian, his expression cold as he said, “Forget your place again, and I'll do even worse yet.”

Thassarian nodded dumbly. Mechanically. That's what he was: A war machine. How could he have forgotten?

“Good.” Arthas waved a hand dismissively. Impatiently. “Now finish the job.”

Another lifeless nod, and then Thassarian looked back to the corpse in his arms and planted his bloody hand against the elf's chest. It took a moment to remember how to channel the necessary magic, and another moment to find the energy to do so.

The body gave a jerk as the necromatic energies flooded its empty veins; the last traces of viable blood were pumped out as the heart jolted and then settled into a slow, strong beat. What followed was a thicker, blacker ooze—dead blood. Poison, probably, if it were to be introduced to a living body. Thassarian was no scientist. The finer details of undeath were lost on him.

The bones stitched themselves back together now. The shoulder finished healing, crackling and twitching faintly as fissures in the bones sealed themselves shut and the joint moved back into its proper place. The vertebrae and bottom ribs Thassarian had smashed through reattached, their shards reuniting into single, solid bones held together with magic. Pops lower down signaled similar processes taking place in the corpse’s knees.

Next came the muscles and tendons, their regeneration heralded by wet sounds that briefly put Thassarian in mind of snakes and worms and maggots. The images vanished with the sounds. The sounds ended in time for the flesh at Koltira's gut, back, and shoulder to pull itself back together, sealing shut with dark, ugly scars where the edges of the old wounds met.

The ears did not return to their old, uninjured tapers. Necromancy did not regrow what was gone—it only forced existing processes to continue and reformed what was in pieces. The cuts and chops dried and became scars of toughened cartilage, but the ears remained ruined when it was done.

The face changed. The gash across the bridge of his nose pulled into a dark, puckered scar, as did the much smaller cut across his left cheekbone; the cheeks and the flesh around the eyes sank inwards, leaving what had been youthful and strong looking haggard and sickly. No longer handsome, now the dead man's features had become a mockery of comeliness, their sharp angles and hard shadows just so enough to be off-putting.

But the face remained the same, as well. There was the long line of his nose, the slight bump in the otherwise straight bridge of it. There were the wide eyes, closed now but beginning to roll fitfully behind their lids. There were the mismatched lips—both thinner than could be called attractive, but one side of the bottom lip thinner than the other, just enough to be noticeable with a long look. There still were the proud cheekbones, not high or elegant but smooth even now that they stood out in greater relief than before.

The soul fought being dragged back and anchored to this newly-twisted shell, as Thassarian dimly remembered his own had done months before. Here was Koltira, struggling in the grasp of Thassarian's magic, screaming wordlessly for the freedom of the peaceful death Thassarian denied him. If he listened hard enough, Thassarian thought perhaps he might hear Koltira pleading with him to stop the spell before the reanimation could be completed. For a moment, he considered doing so… and then dispelled the thought with the knowledge that Arthas would do the job himself and make it a torture of its own if it came to that.

Thassarian imagined taking Koltira's soul by the shoulders, as he might if the elf stood living still before him. He imagined boxing Koltira across the ears until he stilled, and the struggling spirit grew compliant in response. When he imagined returning Koltira to the ground, he did so carefully, the way he might lay a sick man across a bed so he might recover in comfort. The spirit pushed once more against his will before submitting and returning to the corpse.

Koltira gave him no further trouble as he completed the spell and bound broken spirit and unnatural body inseparably together. Thassarian could practically taste the elf's despair as the bond was sealed, and knew—because he knew Koltira—that he had not accepted his fate, only given up trying to fight it any longer. Koltira had been young and brazen, and proven many times that the only way to stop him at any venture was to exhaust him. It was how Thassarian had once won arguments with him; now it was how Thassarian damned him.

The spell was finished—and Koltira's eyes shot open, gleaming the icy blue of the Scourge and burning with blind fury as he surged upwards, his hands reaching for Thassarian's throat. An unholy howl left the elf, high and warbling and now echoing itself. Spittle flew from his mouth.

Thassarian shoved back and up, leaving a gory handprint across Koltira's chest as the elf buckled under the force of the push. He recovered immediately, snapping around and up onto his feet with greater fluidity than he had ever had in life. When he came again for Thassarian, he was met with a cuff to the side of the head, yowled again, charged _again—_

There came a flash of blackness at Koltira's mid-back. With it came a loud snap, and the elf tumbled to the ground, paralyzed from the chest down. His sudden immobility did little to curb Koltira's frothing rage, and Thassarian stepped out of arm's reach before the elf could get any ideas about taking him down at the ankles.

He chanced a look up at the dais and immediately wished he hadn't—because of course Arthas had been the one to cast that spell, and of course the bastard was enjoying Koltira's newfound madness. Arthas enjoyed anything that brought suffering to those who defied him.

Thassarian looked. And there, perched on his skeleton throne, Arthas looked down at the spectacle before him, grinning again as Koltira continued to snarl and scrabble for purchase against the broken ground.

“Heel, Koltira.” Arthas’ voice rang with the victory of the grave, and Thassarian despaired.


	4. Zugzwang

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> German, "compulsion to move."
> 
> When a player is put at a disadvantage by having to make a move; where any legal move weakens the position. Zugzwang usually occurs in the endgame, and rarely, in the middlegame.

A sharp snarl startled Thassarian from his malaise, focusing him again on the crippled, feral thing splayed across the ground that had once been a Farstrider.

Arthas’ spell had drawn Koltira's attention to the fallen prince, and now the elf dragged himself towards the dais with his arms, reeling off a string of obscenities in Thalassian and Common until a second black burst struck and broke his right shoulder, knocking the elf flat on his stomach.

“The third one takes your head off,” Arthas informed Koltira. He turned his gaze to Thassarian and added, “Control this one before I take it upon myself to teach him to behave.”

Thassarian stepped forward and swept down to grab Koltira by the back of his neck—ungentle now, for there was no longer any risk of breaking the elf. Koltira spat and reached back with his good hand to claw blindly at Thassarian, which did nothing at all to prevent the human from hauling him upright and shaking him like a misbehaved pup.

“Get a hold of yourself,” Thassarian snapped. “It's done. You belong to the Scourge, now.”

Koltira spat another obscenity in Thalassian. With Arthas’ eyes on them, Thassarian couldn't afford to be patient with the elf. He released Koltira and hit him hard across the jaw as he fell, sending the former ranger sprawling across the ground again.

“Stay down,” Thassarian barked as Koltira sluggishly attempted to get his arms beneath him. Koltira flinched, then shifted the good arm so that he was propped more securely on it.

Thassarian crossed the space between them in two long strides and kicked the elf's arm out from under him. It wasn't a blow he would have expected to break any bones, and yet the elbow shattered under his foot, sending Koltira collapsing to the dirt with a sharp sound that could almost have passed for a grunt.

Thassarian's nose wrinkled; he'd forgotten the torture Koltira had already endured. Were all of his joints this unstable?

Koltira glared balefully up at him, effectively immobile now that his limbs had all been crippled. It didn't stop yet another curse from slithering out through the elf's teeth, and Thassarian used his toe to give the fool a hard nudge in the ribs.

“You're too brittle to be this feral,” he told the elf. “And too green for it beyond that.”

“Both easily dealt with.” Arthas’ tone had picked up a dismissive edge, and Thassarian looked around in time to see the champion wave one hand as if to shoo away some flying pest. “Drag him to the cultists and have him put back together again. There's no room in the Scourge for weaklings who fall apart the moment they're struck.”

A dismissal. Thassarian supposed he should be relieved to finally take Koltira away and be done with this mess. Grateful, even. Somehow, staring down at the broken, slavering man writhing at his feet left him unable to feel much of anything at all.

Koltira hissed like a cat, opening his mouth and letting out a sharp breath from the back of his throat as Thassarian bent down to retrieve him. The echo of undeath made the sound more menacing; the bloodless pallor of his gums gave the impression that the elf's teeth are much longer than they truly were. That would fade some as time and service to the Scourge saw each of those teeth yellowed, chipped, or replaced entirely with spares or bits of metal.

“You're wasting your time,” Thassarian told the elf as he reached down to grab him at the base of his neck. Koltira thrashed and tried to angle his head to sink his teeth into Thassarian's arm, but Thassarian hauled him upright and gave him another hard shake before he could manage it.

The elf's lower body dangled uselessly; his feet rested against the ground at angles that seemed almost obscene in their wrongness. Suspended as he was, Koltira was somewhat more willing to bring his left arm into play, though doing so jostled his broken elbow and clearly caused him a great deal of discomfort. His right arm hung limply at his side, twitching periodically but unable to move with its shoulder joint destroyed.

Thassarian wasn't happy about the prospect of dragging Koltira along through the camp; the recovery area was past the makeshift dungeon, and with a rabid elf in tow the walk could take a solid fifteen minutes. It was bad enough that the drag would further damage Koltira's feet and legs, but the elf was still completely unclad on top of that. Even if Koltira wasn't sane enough to be humiliated at being paraded about naked in front of the rest of the camp, he would regain his senses eventually—and Thassarian would know regardless. Thassarian would remember, even if Koltira did not.

There was no helping it; Thassarian didn't have the luxury of time to stand around pondering alternate methods of hauling his uncooperative charge to the cultists. He had already tested Arthas’ patience far too much today.

Thassarian tightened his grip on the back of Koltira's neck, keeping the still snarling elf controlled as he turned to leave—and stopped at the sight of a cultist entering the tent. This one was a man, and had discarded his hooded overrobe with its long, flowing sleeves, as the cultists seemed to prefer when working with the newly-resurrected. The man was well into his senior years, not as tall as Koltira, nor quite as powerfully built as Thassarian or Arthas… but he was another set of hands. A competent set, at that, and unlikely to want to exacerbate or add to what already existed for his fellows to mend and strengthen.

Koltira spat and snapped his teeth as the cultist drew near, driven into another frenzy by the stench of a living creature in his presence. Neither Thassarian nor the cultist paid the elf any mind; whether that played into Koltira's renewed hissing and gnashing was anyone's guess.

The cultist gave Arthas a quick, cursory bow—respectful, but indicative of someone with orders to follow and a short window of time in which to carry them out—and ripped open a death gate, gesturing for Thassarian to drag Koltira through. Thassarian went, grateful that at least the task of hauling Koltira along with him meant that he wasn't able to turn and offer Arthas any show of respect. Doing so with a straight face was an effort on most occasions; now it might have been an impossibility.

Thassarian assumed stepping into a death gate was a great deal like being the subject of any other teleportation spell: A vague impression of reality being warped around him, accompanied by a feeling of being drawn forward by his insides that was uncomfortable but not painful. But with a death gate, there was also a sensation akin to passing through a thin layer of cold slime; from the muted noise that escaped Koltira, the elf didn't appreciate this any more than Thassarian did. At least it was over in the next instant, when Thassarian took another step, exited the gate, and landed the pair of them at an empty stone table in the recovery area of the Scourge camp. The cultist who had opened the gate stepped through behind him and sealed the portal shut; it slithered out of existence with just enough force to push the scent of mold and rotted bones towards the trio as it vanished.

Four more cultists stood at the ready around the slab, all of them reasonably strong men, though their ages varied widely between the old man who had opened the death gate and one who seemed barely into his majority. All but one of the cultists were living men; the fifth was an undead who showed the telltale bruises and scratches of one who had succumbed to plagued grain.

Thassarian let the old cultist join the others ahead of him, noting as he paused and shifted his grip on Koltira that all of the other cultists had also removed their overrobes. Two of them had gone a step farther and removed the second, more fitted robes beneath, leaving them dressed in loosely fitted pants and blood- and ichor-stained undershirts. Koltira would have a difficult time getting a secure hold on anyone's clothes once he was whole enough to thrash again… assuming becoming whole made him strong enough to snap free of the metal shackles bolted to the table.

The one blessing of Koltira's current state was that he was neither physically able to fight as Thassarian held him atop the table to be contained, nor coherent enough anymore to spit curses or leftover blood at Thassarian as each shackle was snapped into place. Thassarian tried to ignore the writhing scrap of concern at the back of his mind as he met Koltira's mad stare unblinkingly. Everyone was this feral upon reanimation. Koltira would recover his senses just as surely as Thassarian himself had.

And then what?

The cultists snapped the last restraint shut and motioned for Thassarian to step away. He obliged, though remained near enough to watch their work—and intervene, should the worst case scenario become reality and Koltira somehow managed to break free of his restraints.

Thassarian wasn't entirely sure the elf would have the strength to do so. Two bands held each of the elf's arms, one at the bicep and the other near the wrist; two more bands secured either leg above the knee and above the ankle. Short, heavy chains bolted these tight against the table, rendering the captive effectively immobile beyond the ability to twitch less than an inch in any direction. A wide metal shackle closed around his chest, its hinges at either side of the table and its arch flat enough—theoretically—to ensure that Koltira would remain pressed firmly against the slab no matter how hard he thrashed.

The cultists went to work on Koltira’s limbs, first. It took two of them to reposition and mend the damage to his shoulder, and another two to force his spine back into place and piece together the many shards its vertebrae had been broken into. The fifth cultist fixed the elf's shattered elbow, commenting to Thassarian as he worked that this was the “least extensive” of Koltira's injuries. Somehow Thassarian had the impression that this was meant to be a reassurance of some sort.

Koltira's spine came back together with an audible crackle, and the elf immediately began struggling in his restraints, stirred again to a frenzy by the return of his ability to control his lower half. Thassarian stepped forward, ready to pin the elf's legs, but was waved off by one of the cultists still working at Koltira's spine. A second later, another crackle turned Koltira's struggles into genuine thrashing, and now Thassarian was motioned forward to lay his weight across one leg while one of the cultists pinned the other.

The arms were mended soon after, the makeup of their bones and tendons and muscles more complex than those of his backbones, and now two more cultists kept Koltira's arms in place while the final two stepped away, out of Thassarian's line of sight. Koltira threw himself about as best he could between his bindings and the multiple bodies pinning him down, and for a moment Thassarian worried the elf might break free after all.

Fortunately that didn't come to pass, and a few moments later the remaining two cultists returned, wheeling between them a large metal basin filled to the brim with searing hot coals. An assortment of metal rods poked out from the basin, their ends glowing lurid shades of yellow-orange that made it difficult for Thassarian to make out exactly what shapes each had been twisted into.

They meant to brand the elf, then, and anchor a spell for reinforcement to each burn. It was a method some higher-ranking mortal within the Cult of the Damned had suggested days before the attack on Quel'Thalas had begun; it seemed Arthas had been specifically waiting to test it on an elf.

The cultists who would set the brands left the kettle and stepped around to either side of the slab, where one of them unlocked the catch holding the band around Koltira's chest shut. Although only one cultist had been needed to snap the metal together, it took the combined strength of two to prise the thing open again, and they struggled visibly in the effort and the metal groaned until it locked into the open position. When they were done, the men stepped back, their faces gleaming with sweat. The smaller of the two trembled through his fingers as he stepped back around to the kettle.

Thassarian wondered if the chest restraint had ever slipped loose and slammed shut while there was still a body in the way. It certainly seemed temperamental enough for there to be a risk, and if it did, the springs in it would give it more than enough force to crush straight through its victim, if not rip them in half. Perhaps branding wasn't the worst thing Koltira could be made to endure, after all.

Thassarian tightened his jaw and looked away as the cultists picked up a brand each and approached the table.

He didn't hear the brands touch down; Koltira's shrieks drowned out the sound of flesh burning, and most of Thassarian's attention was focused on keeping hold of the elf so that his thrashing didn't ruin the marks. He could smell it, though. Cooked undead meat had an odor that could cling to hair and fabric for months; these cultists would stink with it once they were finished, provided this process didn't end with their grisly murders.

It took far longer than it should have. Thassarian knew branding; he had been raised on a farm. He'd helped with the sheep and with his neighbors’ cattle. Branding never took longer than a ten-count; even then, only large beasts with thick fur and tough hides took longer than five seconds to brand down through the hair and into the first layer of skin. He had never set a hot iron to a person's skin, but he was sure bare flesh should only need the briefest tap with the brand for the mark to set.

Thassarian completed a five-count before he saw the cultists step back to the coals and swap out to the next irons. From the stench that choked the air, the top layer of Koltira's skin had been charred. No wonder the elf thrashed so much. Even the dead had their limits.

The cultists each burned three marks into the elf’s chest and stomach. Six total. By the time they were done, Thassarian had developed both a passionate hatred for cultists and a powerful gratitude that undeath brought with it a much stronger stomach. He wondered if he might at least be able to refrain from breaking this group in his bare hands long enough to teach them how to _properly_ brand furless humanoids.

Koltira had not tired throughout the process; if anything, each new brand had made the elf angrier and more savage. By the time the cultists moved to release the shackles keeping their subject pinned, Koltira had developed ichor-darkened foam at the corners of his mouth and cut his arms and legs against his shackles. Thassarian wondered if enough force had been at work to leave the undead man bruised from the hands and arms that had helped restrain him.

Koltira went still as the shackles around his arms were undone, though his ruined chest heaved still with exertion and pain. Undead he may be, but he was newly-raised and his brain still remembered his body's former need for more oxygen in times of stress.

Thassarian knew better than to mistake the elf's sudden calm for docility. Koltira was little better than a rabid animal now, but even rabid animals still had some measure of cunning. Certainly he still had enough sense not to struggle while his shackles were undone. Thassarian tightened his grip as the cultists moved to free Koltira's ankles and sincerely hoped his fellows were doing the same. It wouldn't end well for anyone if the elf broke loose now.

The ankle restraints came loose.

Koltira flung himself bodily towards Thassarian's side of the table, jerking half-free of the cultists on the opposite side and snarling incoherent Thalassian as he struggled to claw at one of his jailors.

Thassarian thought he heard his name as he and the cultists wrestled the elf off the slab—just once, in a break between clumsy insults and wordless howls. It distracted him enough that Koltira was nearly able to twist from his grip before the two cultists who had worked with the brands were able to freeze the elf in place with a pair of binding spells layered atop each other. Only when the spell casters nodded did Thassarian and his fellows release Koltira and step away, relieved for the moment but ready to leap forward again should the need arise.

Koltira's snarling grew in pitch and ire as he was held immobile; twice Thassarian caught the flex of muscle beneath his skin and wondered if even magic was enough to keep the elf from breaking loose and wreaking havoc through the camp.

The marks they had burned into him were certainly extensive, in any event, though they still wept pus and ichor down his front. Fortunately Koltira was unlikely to remember much of this process, and the magic applied to the marks once they were finished would make the elf much more difficult to bring down in battle. All the same, Thassarian found himself chewing down a swell of regret as the cultists reached again for their brands. After everything Arthas had said, it would be bitterly cruel when Koltira awakened from his madness to find himself marked like chattel.

 _If_ he ever awakened.

Doubt was a harder thing to quash than sadness, and the bitter taste of it lingered long after Thassarian thought he'd swallowed it back. Koltira was the first elf to become a death knight; none of his kin had been afforded the supposed honor. It effectively made a laboratory rat out of the former ranger, a test of a high elf's ability to undergo higher-level reanimation without losing his sanity or higher brain functions. It also made Thassarian ill to think too much about.

Koltira spat and snapped his teeth, straining hard against the magic holding him in place as the same two cultists retrieved their kettle and took up a new set of brands. Neither cultist paid him any mind, save to motion to the other three to strengthen the binding spells so that now the elf could scarcely move at all.

The new brands were curved, and these the cultists aimed for Koltira's shoulders. Thassarian could see before they reached their marks that the brands’ curves were too wide; his teeth met in the inside of his cheek as he watched the cultists touch the hot irons down and rock them across the joints. Koltira shrieked again, veins standing out on his neck and face as his flesh was cooked away.

There was a wet, sickening peeling sound when the cultists finally pried the brands away; the skin had fused to the hot metal and some had torn away with it, leaving the edges of the burns ragged and oozing fresh ichor. The sight propelled Thassarian forward at a measured lope, his shaking fists clenched at his sides as he approached the cultists.

“How many more marks do you need to put in him?” he asked, his voice dropping to a growl as he watched the older of the two retrieve another flat brand from the kettle. “Our Lord wants him in working order; you'll do more harm than good this way.”

“Several,” one of the cultists answered. He was the oldest among this group, and he sounded as though Thassarian was neither the first death knight to snarl at him, nor the most frightening. “And these brands will serve as the anchors for our spellwork, allowing for far more time to elapse between visits with one of our order to have the spells renewed. I assure you, the pain he's feeling now is—”

“Greater and more prolonged than it needs to be,” Thassarian finished, “which, in turn, is keeping him agitated and preventing him from coming to his senses. The sooner he calms down, the sooner he will be of any use to the Scourge.”

“Then what do you suggest we do?” the old man asked. “Our orders are to reinforce his body, and at the moment the swiftest and most effective way to do that is to use the brands.”

“Then give me the damn things and I'll do it myself!” Thassarian snapped. “Unlike you fools, I know how to handle a blasted iron properly!”

The cultist curled his lip and tightened his hands around the brand. "You are a death knight. You are one of the most elite _soldiers_ of our army," he said, his words clipped and his tone bordering on snide. "You should allow us to see to such a menial process; this is the sort of thing we have trained for."

Thassarian reached out and had a hand twisted in the front of the living man's robe in the space of a breath. He drew the startled cultist up and forward until their noses nearly met, ignoring the shouts of the other cultists as he snarled, "Give. Me. The brands."

Within the Scourge, as within any army, there were rules and there were _rules_. There were the laws and codes hammered into every death knight upon his rising, and then there were the unspoken, instinctive rules that ran like electricity beneath the formal set. The latter tempered the former with common sense and what passed for morality among the undead, and gave them some sense of context as they scrambled for surer footing in this new existence.

It was a strictly enforced rule that the cultists were not to be harmed, particularly the living ones. Since the cultists were such talented menders, “harmed” generally tended to mean anything that rendered them useless or that they couldn't fix, which usually boiled down to death or the removal of a limb. The unspoken rule, therefore, was that at a certain point even the most jaded cultists were expected to shut their mouths and give way to the angry undead thing confronting them.

The cultist Thassarian held turned pale and handed over the brand without any further comment.

The metal had begun to cool and darken; Thassarian set it back into the kettle until it returned to its blistering glow, then stepped away and approached Koltira. One brave cultist had swept the elf's hair over one shoulder and stood holding it there, ensuring that it wouldn't catch between the brand and Koltira's skin. Another cultist pointed to the spot on Koltira's back where Thassarian was to place the brand: right across the elf's left shoulder blade, parallel to the ridge of his spine.

Thassarian stopped and let himself eye his canvas for a moment. Koltira's back had been scarred even in life, and although those marks had all been old and pale by the time Thassarian was first allowed to see them, they had been extensive, and spoke to more than one narrow escape from some grisly fate. In undeath, those scars were scarcely more than lines and ridges of uneven flesh, so pale was the skin surrounding them—but there they still were.

Koltira had always been proud of those scars. He had laughed at Thassarian's initial reaction to them (“Sweet Light, Koltira! Did you escape from some troll’s beast pen?”) and then visibly swelled with pride when Thassarian's shock turned to awe. The elf had even called the scars his stripes, always in a tone of voice that implied there was some deeper meaning to the term that Thassarian never learned.

But far more prominent were the wounds that had not been healed before Koltira’s death: The bite Thassarian had left in his right shoulder was blackened now, its raised edges the color of a deep, ugly bruise against the pale backdrop of the unbroken flesh around it. The exit point of Thassarian's killing blow had sealed itself to a small, puckered mound of darkened skin, and lower down, near the small of Koltira's back, there were dark gouges that Thassarian hadn't noticed before. He dimly remembered watching Brennan kick the elf forward when they had first arrived in Arthas’ tent; the gouges must have come from the many spikes that adorned the man's boot.

The new scars were obscene to Thassarian's eyes. He wondered—because hope was a dead thing here—if any of the brands would help to hide them, and thrust the one in his hands firmly against Koltira's back.

He removed the iron almost as soon as it connected with Koltira, too swiftly to quite complete a one-count. As he'd suspected, that brief contact was all that was needed; though Koltira spat and strained again at the magic binding him, the burn Thassarian left in his flesh was shallow and clean, especially in comparison to all the burns that had come before it. Thassarian stuffed the used brand back into the kettle and reached for the next, letting himself slip into a half-forgotten rhythm and telling himself this was all much easier now than it was before.

Koltira's back ultimately bore six marks identical to those that marred his stomach. None of the marks obscured the dark new scars from his murder; most of them had instead destroyed the better part of the older scars, erasing them with a flash of heat.

Thassarian dropped his last brand to the coals with enough force to send embers flying from the kettle. He told himself that was an act of clumsiness, and that it was the due to the strain of doing something so precise for a change.

One of the cultists stepped forward and scrutinized the burns as though he were evaluating a sculpture. Thassarian watched as the man's features brightened with approval and imagined how easy it would be to crush the mortal’s head between his hands.

“Beautiful work,” the cultist commented. He was one of the younger ones, and clearly one of the more foolish, as well. “Would you be willing to teach us your technique?”

“Are we finished?” Thassarian growled.

The cultist drew back at the question, visibly seeming to remember that he was not in whatever sordid pit passed for the Cult’s lecture hall.

“Not quite,” the boy said apologetically. “There are marks to be placed on both of his thighs, as well.” He gestured to the kettle as he spoke.

Thassarian stared into the kettle for a long moment before he felt steady enough to ask, “Am I meant to use the same brands that marked his shoulders?”

“Yes,” the cultist answered. “The curves should be large enough for it, but if not—”

Thassarian's rage flared beyond his exhausted control and found an outlet through his outstretched hand, surging through his veins like a torrent of ice shards before exploding into the open air. Whatever spell he cast came out dark and glittering, and it blasted the cultist off his feet and sent him tumbling across the ground as his fellows scattered for cover. The boy left a streak of blood and torn flesh in his wake and laid unmoving where he finally stopped; from where Thassarian stood, it looked as though the cultist’s chest had been blasted apart.

Koltira yowled and threw himself against the binding spells again, riled by the sudden violence and the scent of fresh blood. Fortunately the spells held; Thassarian must not have killed any of the cultists responsible for keeping the elf restrained.

“Where do I set the brands for his legs?” Thassarian asked, lowering his hand again and turning a glare on the oldest cultist.

The old man slipped carefully forward and mutely pointed out the place on either thigh. “You'll only need to brand the outsides,” he explained as he stepped away again—well out of swinging range with a brand.

Thassarian turned and swiped up one of the curved brands from the kettle. Koltira recognized the sound by now and spat some garbled bit of profanity as he continued to struggle.

It reminded Thassarian of a beast hogtied across the ground. Like a stud, eyes rolling, sides streaked with sweat as it tried its damnedest to get up and away. It was fitting, then, that Thassarian set the next brand down on the elf's thigh. It seemed almost equivalent to branding a steer across the rump.

He hesitated with the first leg; for the fraction of an instant he let the iron hover over the skin as faded memories of the sights and sounds of farmyard branding warred with the reality of what he was doing, and to whom. His eyes fell on the blackened gore that still colored his right arm. Hadn't he done enough...?

Koltira's leg quivered in response to the heat, and the elf snapped his teeth and snarled venomously.

Exactly like a tied steer.

It was the incentive Thassarian needed to push the brand against Koltira's thigh. He let the hiss of cooked flesh and Koltira's startled yowl tear through him like thorn vines strung through his ears, and when it came time to brand the other leg he did not allow himself to think or look away from his task.

The brands had differing curves. The first had been wide enough to mold to Koltira's leg without trouble; the second had an arch that was just a hair too narrow, and Thassarian was forced to rock it until enough of Koltira's flesh met the metal to leave one solid mark. The mark left behind when he was finished was deep and ugly at the left- and righthand edges, and oozed little dots of scorched ichor as Koltira spat again.

This time, when Thassarian laid down his brand, he considered putting his hands into the kettle as well, to burn away the feel of a brand’s grip in his palms. One of the cultists wheeled the kettle away before he could act on the compulsion. Thassarian supposed that was for the best; the sound of flesh burning away would only rile Koltira up yet again.

Thassarian wasn't needed for the spellwork that came next, and now he was glad to stand aside and watch as magic was anchored to Koltira's burns that would make the elf more difficult to break even than Thassarian. This was a good thing, really. This was something that would keep Koltira from being felled and deemed useless. If he must be damned, at least the elf deserved to command some measure of respect in his damnation.

Thassarian tried to focus on the words the cultists spoke and the gestures they made with each spell; it was better than letting himself hear the way Koltira continued to howl at the living creatures who hovered so near.

All of the newly-raised death knights Thassarian had seen—including the two others he himself had raised—had fallen into a malaise within a few minutes of their awakening. It had been nearly half an hour by now, and still Koltira fought his restraints with a savagery unlike anything Thassarian had seen from him in life.

Thassarian told himself it was because Koltira hadn't been put into a cage yet, and as a result he was overstimulated. There was fresh blood in the air; there was surely still be some level of pain. Surely that was the only reason why the elf showed no sign yet of coming back to his senses. It was only the stench of the living cultists and the fading sting of the symbols they had burned into him that kept him so riled.

Surely.

The magic they bled into him turned his brands a uniform, arcane blue. Thassarian refused to acknowledge how familiar that color seemed, or why it should be familiar at all. It was a hard thing that Koltira would be forced to do the same when he was sane again, but such was the mercy of the Scourge: Nothing came without a cost.

Koltira seemed to register the effect of the spells immediately. The elf went still as each one was activated; when the last spell had been put in place, he threw himself into his struggles with rabid abandon, snapping his teeth and hissing at the cultists until foam flew from his mouth. This time he strained the binding spells enough that the air began to hum just at the edge of Thassarian's hearing, and the cultists maintaining the restraints broke out into a heavy sweat as they threw more power into keeping Koltira rooted.

Thassarian was moving forward to control the elf even before any of the cultists motioned for him to do so. Koltira locked eyes with him and gave a vicious snarl as he approached.

“Quiet,” Thassarian barked. “That's enough.”

Koltira drew his lips back and let out a long, seething hiss. It was the closest he'd come to giving anyone a coherent response since the tent; Thassarian chose to take that as a positive sign.

“We'll need to change the binding spell around him,” one of the cultists said. When Thassarian turned to face him, the living man added, “We won't remove it, naturally. We only need to alter it so that he can move to the cages under his own power without breaking free and attempting to rampage through the camp.”

 _Attempting._ The word wasn't said with any more venom than the cultists usually had for the newly resurrected, but it drew Thassarian up short all the same—reminded him that he wasn't the only one here with plenty enough strength and training to control Koltira. The reminder was enough of a shock to clear Thassarian's head for a moment, enabling him to respond more appropriately to the issue of containing the incensed elf.

He waited as the cultists did their work; whatever crude words they spoke as they gestured at the elf allowed Koltira to lurch forward, but the movement was clumsy and sluggish, as though he was trapped up to his chest in swamp muck. Still, Koltira tried to make the most of his freedom with a laughably slow swipe at the nearest cultist, who dodged the attack easily.

“Just mind he doesn't get a hand on you,” the cultist told Thassarian. “He's slower, not weaker.”

Thassarian closed wordlessly with Koltira, ignoring his caterwauling as he quickly wrestled both of the elf's arms behind his back. Koltira spat and jerked about, but the binding spells gave Thassarian just enough time to move with the elf and prevent him from breaking free.

“Enough!” This time Thassarian punctuated his order with a hard slap to the back of Koltira's head, not hard enough to do damage to his neck, but enough still to get the message through. “Walk forward.”

Koltira snarled and gave his head a hard shake—to clear it, evidently, because he started forward at a sullen lope without any more trouble.

Three of the cultists followed them as they made their way through the recovery area to the cages. At least this area of the Scourge camp was populated mostly by cultists and their undead assistants; the former were used to seeing the newly raised in various states of undress, and the latter didn't quite have the brain function left to them to register that Koltira was still completely naked, or that there should be anything odd about that. It wasn't a comfort to Thassarian, but at least it was more tolerable than having to parade Koltira past banshees or any of the other death knights.

The containment units were at the center of the recovery area and crawled with cultists who maintained the spells in each cage and monitored the undead inside each one for signs of stability and sanity. The cages themselves were little more than boxes made of stone and metal, bathed with spells for silence and darkness and set on wheels that sank into the ground when the cages sat idle for too long. It took the strength of a flesh horror to drag one cage as the army traveled, and there were currently seven cages in all.

Two of the cages were occupied; Thassarian marked the closed doors and the cultists standing guard at the cages and lead Koltira to the farthest open cage from them. It wasn't any great distance—the cages were situated in a circle with a diameter of perhaps five or six yards—but it was _something,_ at least. If Koltira cried out as he regained his senses, perhaps the distance would be just enough to prevent the cultists from hearing exactly what he said, and so spare at least a fraction of the elf's dignity.

Koltira didn't seem to like the sight of the cage. He snarled through gritted teeth and braced his feet, leaning back against Thassarian with enough strength that the human began to have some difficulty urging him onward.

Left with no other immediately apparent option, Thassarian finally gave in to frustration and kicked at the back of Koltira's right knee, buckling that leg forward and unbalancing the elf enough that Thassarian was able to wrestle him the rest of the way to the cage and then through the narrow door that was the only way in or out.

The inside was already bespelled, so Koltira's wordless protests didn't echo—but the walls were still visible, albeit only barely. Surely with the binding spells in place, they should seem pitch-black and nondescript even with the door open…

It took a moment for him to realize where the light was coming from. The spells scorched into Koltira's body hadn’t just turned his burns a pale blue color; so much magic seethed in his flesh now that the affected areas glowed with it, casting the inside of the cage in the dim, murky blue hues Thassarian saw.

Maybe the runes were counteracting the blindness spell because the competing spells were from the same school of magic. Thassarian wasn't sure, and he wasn't going to ask and risk alerting the cultists to something they could correct. It was still impossibly dark inside; surely it wouldn't do any harm to allow Koltira to see where he was.

Koltira grew calm as the dark monotony of the cage registered with him; his snarls died down to a few low, cursory growls as he looked around and took an unwary step forward.

Thassarian shoved him the rest of the way and then jerked back in time for the cultists to slam the narrow door shut, closing Koltira inside. The elf immediately threw himself at the door and nearly slammed it open in spite of the two cultists wedging themselves against it from the outside; Thassarian had to step in and add his own strength to the struggle to give the third cultist time to seal the door first with a heavy corporeal lock, and then with multiple spells for locking and warding the entrance. Only once this was finished did Thassarian and his fellows step back again. Koltira's struggles on the inside did not cease.

“That's a good, strong one,” the old cultist said. His voice was tinted with the barest suggestion of approval. “I'm not sure he'll be calm for several hours, yet.”

“How will we know whether he's kept his mind?” Thassarian asked.

“He'll start speaking coherently, for starters. You should notice that first of all.” The cultist plucked at something on the sleeve of his robe. “It'll be the usual after that: Confusion, fear, existential angst. By morning he'll either have exhausted himself or come around to his new existence on his own.”

Thassarian glanced upwards and doubted they would see sunset for a few hours yet.

“Is it… normal for it to take so long?” he asked. He couldn’t remember a great deal of his own awakening beyond the all-consuming cold and the dread that it had brought with it as his madness had faded. No one had told him—and he had never cared enough to ask—how long he had been volatile after being turned.

“It varies,” the cultist answered. “Some are in complete command of themselves within a few hours; those who are slain in battle, for example, or who die after a period of prolonged torment, tend to take far longer.” He jerked his head back towards the cage and continued, “Now, I assume you were the one who raised him?”

“I was,” Thassarian answered, keeping his face and voice carefully blank.

The old cultist nodded and sucked at his teeth for a moment as he eyed Thassarian. Then he rolled his bony shoulders and said, “That settles it, then. You'll be staying with him until he's fit for duty.”

That drew Thassarian up short. “What?”

“The newly-raised tend to gravitate towards their reanimators once the initial shock wears off; he'll likely only respond positively to you for a while after his madness has passed.” The cultist paused and raised an eyebrow as a muffled shriek sounded from inside the cage. “You won't be inside with him, naturally. Too risky, that. But you'll guard the unit itself, and you'll be there when he emerges to keep a hand on him until he's finished acclimating.”

There was another shriek from within the cage, followed by what sounded like the scrabbling of long nails across stone and iron. One of the cage’s wheels creaked and sank deeper into the frosty earth.

“I think it's the rest of the camp that needs to be guarded against him,” Thassarian commented.

The cultist rattled out a quick chuckle at that before turning businesslike again. “He's the first elf we've tried this with, and the first undead we've used the brands on. We don't know what will happen when he snaps to. Plenty of our order will remain nearby throughout the process,” he added with a nod to his colleagues, “but we'll need somebody physically able to tangle with this one if the need arises. It's best if that someone is also the one who raised him.” He stopped again and seemed to weigh the situation before adding, “It should also help that he knew you in life. He might respond best to a friendly face from the time before his reanimation, especially while he's still coming to terms with his new functionality.”

Thassarian let his teeth come together and stepped around the old man to stand beside the door of the cage. Koltira spat and snarled inside like a cat; if he leaned back against the wall of the cage, Thassarian was sure he would feel it tremble with the elf's struggles.

“One more thing,” the old cultist said. “As his sanity returns, he will become panicked and may call out for you. You _must not_ enter the containment unit under any circumstances. If you were to become trapped in there with him, he could enter a state of heightened aggression and one of you—most likely the elf—could be damaged beyond repair in the ensuing brawl.”

A pale hand with broken nails appeared in Thassarian's peripheral; he whirled and only now noticed the little barred window at the top of the cage door, its sill gleaming with yet more magic. Koltira had managed to find it despite the blinding spells, and clawed frantically at the gaps between the bars until a shock of blue light traveled down the metal and struck his hand. Koltira withdrew again with a livid yowl.

“And mind the window,” the old cultist said. “He can't see it or hear anything through it, but he might remember where he felt it—or happen across it again by accident. Try not to have your face in easy reach.”

“Understood.” Thassarian set his jaw as Koltira howled again.

The cultists finally dispersed, leaving him alone with his caterwauling charge. He was used to standing guard; even if he lived, he could have stood for hours with only a bit of water and jerky to tide him through to the changing of the guard. In death, he needed no nourishment or relief at all. In death he could stand unmoving for days if he was so ordered.

He distracted himself from Koltira's thrashing for the next several hours by watching the goings-on around the containment area. A living elf was dragged to another of the empty units; the man was broken and bloodied, and whatever he had endured to leave him in such a state had rendered him nearly insensate as the two cultists carrying him ushered him into a cage. One cultist emerged immediately; the second knelt just inside the threshold, his form blurred slightly by the blinding spells within.

Whatever the kneeling cultist did caused the living elf to yelp, and the cultist rose and backed away as a bloodied arm swung clumsily after her. The cage door slammed shut and was locked; if the elf inside it made any sound of protest, Thassarian couldn't hear it from where he stood.

That must have been another of the rangers—one of Koltira's comrades, captured alongside him the day before. Thassarian wondered what fate awaited the poor bastard; clearly he wasn't meant to be raised as a ghoul before the elves of Stillriver Sanctuary tomorrow.

Time wore on. The cultists worked in shifts, one group trading out with another at evenly spaced intervals. Thassarian supposed that made sense; necromancers though they were, surely even they needed a break now and then from wrestling with unhappy patients and prisoners.

By the time the sun had begun to dip towards the western horizon, Koltira had fallen silent and—apparently—stopped throwing himself against the walls. Thassarian allowed himself to lean back against the cage, ears straining for any sound from the inside. The old cultist hadn't said anything about prolonged bouts of quiet. Had he forgotten to mention it, or was it not something that happened during a successful turning?

He waited and listened until the cultists traded out again; then, driven by some nagging thing he told himself was simple curiosity, he turned and peered through the window.

He found Koltira huddled in a far corner of the cramped space, knees curled to his chest and hands tangled in his matted hair. The elf was shaking hard, and Thassarian knew it couldn't be from the cold.

There was a quiet sound from inside the cage, low and constant. It took Thassarian a while to realize it was Koltira muttering to himself—and just as the realization struck, the elf began to rock slowly back and forth.

Thassarian backed away from the window, clenching his teeth against a sudden knot in his throat—the product of disgust, surely. He turned and put his back to the cage.

A low, mournful sound erupted from the inside, chilling Thassarian down to his already frigid bones. It ended, then rose up again, and again, and again, each time sounding more frantic than the last, until it wasn't a sob but a series of short, terrified wails. Thassarian heard the beginnings of panicked, half-formed words as the cries went on and wished that Koltira had stayed silent instead. It would be better. It would be kinder if he had lost his mind. This…

At length the wailing stopped, breaking off into a shuddering, half-whispered whine. Silence came after; perhaps the elf had calmed down. Perhaps he was mindless after all. That might not be such a terrible thing, in the end. He could be destroyed and allowed to remain dead if he proved useless. If he was mindless and useful, at least he would never understand what had become of him.

It would be kinder, wouldn't it?

The whine broke into a sharp gasp… and then Koltira's voice came through the window, soft and frightened and horribly, horribly clear.

“Thassarian…?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So now it's going to be five chapters. For real this time. I promise.


	5. Flag Fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The moment when the clock stops for one player in a game of chess, indicating that the player has no more time left._

Koltira collapsed before Arthas, boneless and broken. An emptiness yawned beneath him, and he fell forward and let it swallow him at the foot of the dias.

Arthas spoke, and his voice was all Koltira knew. He spoke, and in his words there were clarity and logic. Koltira was drawn to it; after all he had endured, this was gentle. This was safe. A reprieve from the torment. If he listened, if he obeyed, maybe they wouldn't hurt him anymore. Maybe they would let him be, if he behaved himself.

He could behave. He would, if it meant he would be hurt no longer. If it was an end, he would obey. It was no great sacrifice to obey for the sake of peace.

The world erupted as he lay before the throne. After everything he had endured, it was far too much, and far too sudden, and he cringed against the ground as madness swept about him.

There was a voice, loud, furious, shouting amidst a chaos of movement. He knew the voice; his body responded to it without his conscious thought spurring it. He didn't understand. He couldn't understand. There was only instinct, and reaction was born from it.

He launched himself at the good voice, the friendly voice—to protect, to assist, something. Anything. He was needed. His bones sensed it. His blood rang with it. His training took hold where his mind could not: _Protect. Protect. Protect._

He met fists and came back to himself.

Thassarian was swinging on him, his eyes unseeing though they were wide with fury. Koltira tried to back away, but the man followed, driven by some madness or magic, and Koltira was forced to defend himself in turn.

This must be magic. Thassarian would never—

Heat and pain tore across his nose and Koltira staggered back with a snarl, raising his hands to his face and leaving his fore completely unguarded.

He felt an impact.

He tasted blood.

He fought to inhale against a pressure in his gut and the pain washed across him like slag, like snowmelt, like a thousand, thousand blades. He tried to scream and vomited blood; his hands came up to cradle his gut and closed instead around an arm.

Thassarian looked up at him. His eyes were clear again, focused, and Koltira wanted to hide them, cover them, protect Thassarian from the sight of this, _protect_ …

His legs buckled. Pain, pain as he fell, pain as Thassarian's arm slammed up against his ribcage, and Koltira choked on his own blood because there was no air to scream with.

The pain didn't flee, but it changed, lessened, became bearable. Koltira clutched at Thassarian's arm as he felt himself lowered to the ground. His hands were weak. Slicked with too much blood.

But Thassarian was there, hovering over him. The firmness he felt supporting his neck must be Thassarian's doing. Holding him. Cradling him. It was Thassarian kneeling over him now, all Thassarian, large and strong and feeling far too deeply for all of it. He would be so much better off if he didn't feel. He would be so much harder to hurt, and Koltira would be so much lonelier for it. Brave Thassarian, strong Thassarian with his great, bleeding heart. He always cared too much, the oaf.

Koltira smiled to see him again. It had been too long, far, far too long, and there had been such darkness before that fled now that he was back. Thassarian was here, and maybe that didn't fix anything, but it made the darkness lose its terror, made the weight of it easier to bear.

He was still a soldier, his Thassarian. There was a flicker of pride beneath the pain, pride because Thassarian had fought him and won, pride for his strength, pride because at least he had been allowed to stay strong in the end. Worthy of strength. His Thassarian, worthy of his new rank. Koltira was not surprised, but he was proud.

The pain flared. His vision turned a garish, horrid red, and when it cleared again it was agony even to breathe. To move, and all his body moved, blood pumping, lungs fluttering, muscles twitching, veins trembling, on and on and on and Light, he just wanted to lie still and rest for a moment, just a moment. Too much. It was too much.

Thassarian understood. Good Thassarian, brave, loyal Thassarian with more wit than he let show and more beauty than what lay upon the surface. He knew, he understood. Thassarian would make it stop.

There was another flare, awful and choking and tearing at him until Koltira screamed through the rush of blood in his throat. Too much, too much, too much…

…Slowly it ended.

Slowly the pain melted away.

Slowly came the darkness, warm now, soft and soothing. Koltira felt himself raised gently up and let it be, closed his eyes and let himself be borne away—

The darkness shattered and cold wrapped itself like irons about him, dragging him down, yanking at him and shredding the warmth and peace until he looked and _saw_. Shadows surrounded him, living, dead, screaming, silent, shadows of all shapes reached for him and clawed at him, pushing him down, draining his strength, his life, draining _him._

He screamed without sound and struggled in the darkness. The irons tightened. The claws grew sharper and dug deeper and ripped greater holes into him and still he screamed. He had to flee, to be away from here and find the warmth again, the safety, the peacefulness—

He was struck, and he knew the one who struck him. He was captured, and he knew the one who pulled him down beneath the shadows and away from their claws.

The body was wrong. It was dead. A rock. A fallen tree. He did not belong here—but the one he knew disagreed, held him there, bound him to it, and at last his strength gave out. He would not fight this one. He couldn’t harm what he must _protect._

Madness crashed against him, drowned him, choked him, crushed him _broke him **bled him**_ and he came up and screamed and ripped at it, ripped at the pain of it, ripped at all the world and

lost.

✴

Pain and rage broke hard against a cold stone wall, and with their shattering he knew terror and screamed.

There were walls and he could not see—there was a door and a window but he could not find them and the darkness reigned.

Dead flesh covered him. Dead flesh, cold flesh, and he could smell burned flesh and foul magic and felt pain and could not see why it should be so and screamed for the not-knowing of it all and flung himself against the rocks until his nails broke and his palms and chest were worn raw. He rebounded, he staggered, away from the rock, away from the pain, he wanted none of them, none of them—

He fell and landed hard in a cradle of rock and metal, and some clarity returned, hard and merciless as his cage, his prison, his grave—

Not his grave. _Not his grave,_ he lived yet, he was alive, he was not dead. He pulled his knees to his chest and cradled his head in his hands, trembling though there was no cold, breathless though his lungs worked without ache or stress. He was alive, he was _alive_ , he must be alive, no dead thing could move about—

No dead thing.

But the _undead…_

He heard himself cry out as he jerked his hands away from his head. He couldn't see them; what light he had was dim and near useless to him now in this blackness. They trembled as he brought them against each other; they trembled as he ran them down along the lines of himself, feeling out what he could not see until his feather-light touch brought pain.

There was light where he felt pain, pale blue light, and for a moment he stared down at it, whimpering, unwilling to look away from the only thing that he could clearly see. They were beautiful, softly glowing and vibrant in this pit of blackness and thrumming with magic, cool, quiet magic.

He reached out to it—felt its position on his leg and traced it there from within. He was an elf. He could track magic and identify it better than the most gifted human, and this magic, this lovely, soothing—

The source of it revealed itself to him like a blast of ice, and he screamed and fell away to the floor, scrabbling at the stones there as sobs ripped themselves from his chest—

His _chest_.

He touched his chest, his stomach, and found the scar. Too small, too wet, too puckered, Light, _Light no—_

He wept, clawing at his hair and rolling about until somehow he sat upright again. His flesh was chill and rancid, dead flesh, dead flesh draped across dead bones and brimming with dead, blackened gobs of blood. He choked on a sob that brought bile with it and wailed into the hollow of his own broken, wretched body.

His lips moved without him, mouthing nonsense until he found his voice and gave the words life. Nonsense still: A litany of it, words without meaning, sounds with scarcely any volume and no power to soothe him.

He felt eyes on him. He was being watched. They were _watching him,_ Light help him they were watching him…

Thassarian. Thassarian was here somewhere. He'd been there at the end, he must be near now, surely. He must be here. He must be. They had him, perhaps they had let him stay. They must have. They must have. If he was near, he might… he might…

“Thassarian…?”

The voice startled him… but no, no, that had been his own voice. He had _spoken,_ and he had done so at no one's command. There was hope. Surely there must be hope if he had retained any autonomy…

“Thassarian?” he called again, louder this time. “Thassarian, are you there?”

Silence. Darkness. No voices answered him; no movement betrayed whoever watched him still.

His heart should be hammering in his chest. He should be gasping for breath, his veins should feel like ice and there was _nothing there,_ nothing but numbness and a gnawing fear that had no outlet now at all.

“Thassarian.” Louder again, frantic as he scrambled blindly to his feet. “Thassarian, I know you're there.” He had to be. How could he not be? Of course he was there; he was _always_ there, he must be there…

But nothing answered, and he threw himself against the stones again, scrabbling for purchase and tearing his own skin, his fetid, rotten skin, _Light…_

“Thassarian!” he cried. “Please! Don't leave me here! Please! _Please!_ ”

Metal and open air against his hand. He couldn't see the gap, but he could feel it and so it must be real, it _had_ to be real, it wasn't allowed not to be real, it must be, it _must be_ —

 _“Thassarian!”_ Screaming now, wailing at a pitch that grabbed at his throat and choked his words. “Please! _Please! Thassarian!”_

Nothing and nothing and _nothing_ , even when he grasped outside, even when his nails broke and snapped away from his hands. No pain heralded the breaks but he _felt_ it, he felt them come away, he _knew_ , without sight, without pain, he knew, _he knew—_

He tried to climb the wall, arms straining with new strength (vile strength, dead strength, like rocks and roots and bones), feet scrabbling at the stones until he slipped and fell hard to the floor again. The impact jarred but didn't hurt; his lungs felt it, but his body refused to cry out for their next breath. It didn't need it, he realized. He didn't need air, didn't need his heart to beat, didn't need it, didn't _need it._

He laughed.

There in the blackness, in the silence, across a stone floor slick with blood he hid his head in his arms and laughed until his body shook, until his useless breath hitched and he sobbed without tears. The dead didn't weep, did they? Did they need tears? Did he have any left? Did it _matter?_

He didn't care. He didn't _want_ to care. His laughter turned to sobs and he didn't care. His body didn't tire of the sobbing; the ache he felt was a constant thing, subdued but sharp and pulsing and cold like the rest of him. Was this his new existence? Pain and terror and disgust for everything he was? Was this his due? Did he deserve this? Did he? _Did he?!_

He sobbed and then screamed as something else came over him, something other, something…

 _He_ saw him, through the blackness. _He_ heard him despite the silence. His presence settled over Koltira like frost, melted through him like water, no, like ice, like snowmelt cutting through loose soil _He_ was there, with him, _in_ him, _He was inside his head_ and Koltira screamed again and clawed at his scalp as He spoke.

 _ **Finally awake, little elf?**_ A whispering roar, a murmur that thundered through his bones, and Koltira screamed until the silence rang with his voice and still he could not drown out the awful, awful voice inside his mind.

 _ **Nothing will silence me.**_ Tears streamed now from Koltira's eyes, cold and wrong like the rest of him and he listened even as he screamed and tore again at himself, because he had no other choice.

 _ **No choice,**_ He echoed, and Koltira shrieked with the realization that He was _answering his thoughts._

And He laughed.

And the sound of it broke something in Koltira, and he dragged himself onto his knees and wailed, “Thassarian, kill me! Kill me! Please, Thassarian!”

_**You're already dead, Koltira.** _

“Thassarian!” Higher, breathless, ragged with the horror that choked him. _“Thassarian!”_

_**He is mine as much as you are. He won't give you the freedom you seek.** _

“Please! _Please_ , Thassarian!” He knelt now and threw himself against the wall, embracing it, cursing it, scratching uselessly at it. “Please! Kill me! Please!”

_**He can hear every word. He's been ignoring you all this time.** _

Koltira screamed and flung himself away from the wall—but still he cried out, even as his elbows hit the stones behind him. “Thassarian! Thassarian, _I can hear Him!_ I can hear Him! He can hear me! He's _here!”_

His hands came up to tear again at his scalp as he fell back against the floor, and they were halted, taken away from him by Him and forced back down to his sides as he screamed and writhed against the floor.

_**Like a worm. Like a mouse beneath the talon of a hawk. How does it feel, little elf?** _

“Thassarian!”

_**He can't help you anymore.** _

_“Please!”_

_**There's no use begging now.** _

_“KILL ME!”_

_**He already has.** _

_**Welcome to the grave, Koltira.** _

✴

He wept. The voice left him as he did, but the feel of His presence was burned into Koltira's mind so that he wasn't sure he could trust the sensation of it finally drawing away again—and so he wept, until he had no strength left in him to weep anymore.

Slowly, haltingly, he began to grow calm again. By tiny degrees exhaustion wormed its way through him, and his first coherent thought in hours (days, years) was revulsion at the idea that real worms and maggots would have burrowed through him had he not been raised.

Would they still do so, even though he was alive in nearly every manner that counted? It wasn't… really death, was it, if he could still move and think of his own volition? Was it?

It was really just a different kind of living… wasn't it?

He wondered if he stank of rotting flesh. If he did, he couldn't tell anymore. If he _didn't,_ would he begin to, in time? Had anything else smelled foul? Brennan or Thassarian, had either of them smelled like decay?

He couldn't remember.

He frowned and grew still, sprawled bonelessly on his back and staring at the darkness as his mind worked.

He hadn't taken a breath since he'd uttered his last few whimpers. He gasped and air filled him, but it was wrong. It brought scent and a fullness in his lungs, but not relief. There was nothing to relieve.

He didn't need to breathe, then. That much, at least, had been a genuine observation, and not some panic-induced hallucination.

He recognized this use of analysis as a means of steadying himself; it was something he had been taught as a ranger, so that he could calm down and gather information in the same breath and so avoid becoming weakened by his moment of dismay. But it was… off. Broken, or so it seemed. There were gaps in his memory of other aspects of it that were apparent only because his recall seemed incomplete, and because logic told him that should not be so.

He was undead, though. Perhaps his body had been without air long enough before his reanimation that his mind had suffered some minor damage. Didn't drowning victims sometimes lose a portion of their memory when their rescues took longer than a few minutes? Maybe death was the same, in a way. Like drowning; hadn't he choked on his own blood at the end?

He spent the rest of his time in the blackness remembering, testing himself with faces, names, maps he had memorized, routines and regulations his instructors had hammered through his bones in his youth until they had become as integral to his existence as the blood coursing in his veins.

He had forgotten less than he'd expected to—and much more than he hoped.

The silence shattered around him, and he cried out as a sudden wave of sound assaulted him, far too much, far too loud after the centuries of quiet he had known. Then the darkness bled away, and he hissed and shielded his eyes against the gleam of dimly-lit stones and especially the unfathomable brilliance of the moonlight streaming through a single barred, cat-sized window to the outside world.

He had retained some sensitivity, then. Good to know.

He rolled blindly onto his knees, still guarding his eyes from the milky, painful light. The air around him grew less dense as more spells were undone or removed, and then there came a heavy grinding noise as even more light flooded into the tiny cell. Koltira snarled and pressed his eyes harder against the crook of his arm, keeping that hand turned out so that he could swipe outwards if an attack came. The other arm he brought up and around in a similar manner, farther away from his body and with the hand turned outwards, its fingers curled in a loose claw.

He felt eyes on him before the voice came: “Koltira.”

His ear twitched, and the movement sent a brief pang along its tip. He knew that voice.

“Can you hear me?”

He heard. He shook, his breathing stopped, but he heard. He understood.

He _knew._

“Say something,” the voice commanded. Was that a hint of _desperation_ Koltira heard?

Slowly he lowered his arm from his face, his eyes following it, drinking in the sight of it for a moment—bloodied and scraped but still hale and whole—before he squinted up through the torchlight outside and met Thassarian's gaze. 

Even undead as he was, the human looked strained. _Tired._

Weak.

“Koltira?” Thassarian asked. “Do you understand me?”

Koltira stood, limbs strong underneath him, body loose and uncoiling easily after his hours spent upon the cold stone floor.

Thassarian was watching him still when he raised his eyes again. He flinched from the look Koltira turned on him, like a rat from a snake. The thought was… amusing.

“How long?” Koltira's voice was raw still from his screams and sobs.

Thassarian looked wary now, watchful, his eyes hard on Koltira as he said, “You were raised this morning. It's nearly midnight.”

Not good enough.

“How many _hours?_ ” Koltira ground out.

Thassarian blinked and visibly balked as he said, “I'm… not entirely sure.”

Koltira's lips twitched, but before he could speak, a woman in the robes of the Cult of the Damned stepped around Thassarian and said, “Twenty, give or take. You've been quiet for the last two.”

“Twenty.” The word came quietly from Koltira's mouth, not a growl but a murmur, low and languid. Twenty hours he had burned in this little hell, and eighteen of them he had spent screaming for release, for death. For Thassarian.

Thassarian, who had been there to hear every word. Thassarian, who could have broken him free from this place or forced another to do so.

Thassarian, who had done _nothing._

“How do you feel, Death Knight?” Koltira looked up again at the woman. She had a pinched, weathered face, but she was living still. Koltira's nose wrinkled at the realization.

“Tired of this cage,” he answered shortly.

The woman smiled, and the expression seemed… off to Koltira. Hesitant, almost. “You're stable enough now to leave it,” she told him. “Come; we'll see to it that you're properly geared for—”

“Geared?” Fury spiked through Koltira. Surely these beasts didn't think he would _cooperate_ with them?

“You can't very well accompany the rest of our forces without a weapon and proper armor,” the woman told him with a hint of amusement.

“What makes you think—”

But before he could finish his thought, Koltira was wracked with a sudden, burning agony. His body seized, and through the ringing in his ears he heard himself give a strangled cry as he staggered under the sudden assault.

 _His_ presence settled again through Koltira, driving another scream from the elf's throat as the burning intensified.

_**On your knees.** _

Somehow he kept his feet. Everything was pain, excruciating, blinding, tearing pain in every single nerve throughout him, but he kept—

_**KNEEL.** _

He didn't feel his knees crack against the floor of the cage; the agony was so great now that he knew no other sensation. The world was suffering, agony, fire and ice and acid and rotting and blinding bright and dark as oil and dying, dying, bleeding and screaming and dying…

As suddenly as it had come, the agony ceased. Koltira collapsed to the ground, limp and quivering in the wake of it as his vision slowly cleared.

Strong hands took him, hauling him to his feet by an arm before he could gather his senses enough to resist. The world wavered before his eyes, and he braced himself against his erstwhile helper as he shook his head to clear it.

“ _He_ spoke to you.” Koltira's eyes wheeled for a moment longer, then fell upon the cultist woman. Her eyes were wide; her face, already sickly in color, was now a washed-out white as she stared at Koltira with something resembling awe.

Koltira was tugged forward before he could question the shift in her behavior. He stumbled and turned to glare at his ‘helper’—and then shoved away with a snarl when he realized who had hold of him.

Or he attempted to, at any rate. But Thassarian's grip proved too strong to break even now, so although the human let his arm out to give the elf a few inches of space, Koltira remained effectively fettered to him.

“Find him something to cover up with,” Thassarian told the woman.

She nodded, but remained staring at Koltira for a moment longer before she actually turned and stepped away to do as he'd said.

“Let go,” Koltira hissed.

Thassarian turned a slow look on him, cocking one shaggy eyebrow as he said, “And let you go bolting through the camp until _He_ topples you again? I think not.”

Koltira bared his teeth and gave another, harder yank against the man's grip, with no more success than he'd had with the first. Thassarian continued to watch him in silence, his face completely unreadable and his grip still as strong as iron.

The woman returned bearing some shapeless mass of dirty fur and offered it to Koltira. Now she kept her eyes downward, locking her gaze on the fur rather than Koltira's face as he snatched the garment from her with a sneer.

Thassarian moved. His hands flashed away from Koltira's arm; one came around and under his hair to grip the elf just below the base of his skull. Though it wasn't nearly as bulky as Thassarian's, Koltira did not have an effeminately slim neck; that did not prevent Thassarian's fingers and thumb from easily coming to rest over his sternomastoid muscles.

Koltira growled, but the grip on his neck was only enough to serve as a warning—when he moved to throw the fur about himself, Thassarian moved as well, allowing Koltira to shift as was necessary to wrap the fur around his waist.

He froze when he saw the marks.

Arcane blue patterns clawed across his stomach and gleamed at his thighs, solid blue over flesh that had been burnt and blackened in places. Magic pulsed in every mark until it nearly felt as though blood ran again in the veins beneath them.

Odd—he was suddenly so much more aware of how numb his body felt.

“What have you done to me?” he asked after a moment.

“Those marks are loaded with strengthening magic.” That was the woman cultist. She sounded proud of the work she described, and pleased with the chance to explain it. “Your mortal body suffered extensive damage to its skeletal and muscular systems, as well as multiple internal organs throughout the midsection.” Her smile when he looked up at her was laced with excitement as she continued, “The magic used to raise you was not enough to strengthen the affected areas; it could only pull them back together and bind them in place well enough to facilitate unhindered movement.”

Koltira could take no refuge in the woman's choice of words, for he understood every one. He was a ranger; he had been taught elvish, human, and troll anatomy as part of the early stages of his training, and experience had kept the knowledge cemented in his mind. It had been a necessity for the work he and his once-fellows carried out. Knowledge of the layout of muscles and arteries, for example, could mean the difference between killing and crippling an enemy at range.

He wondered if such knowledge would be necessary now that he was a walking corpse.

“So these… marks are in place to reinforce my body?” Koltira asked. There was genuine curiosity behind the question, if a morbid, vague curiosity. He couldn't find it in himself to care beyond how much more difficult it would be now to end this wretched existence.

“Yes, exactly.” The cultist woman beamed at him, then lowered her eyes again as Koltira finished tying the fur about his waist.

Thassarian pulled him forward once he'd finished. It wasn't hard enough to jerk him off balance; all the same, Koltira could sense that Thassarian's strength still outstripped his own by a decent amount, even now that they bore the same curse. The elf's teeth came together with an angry snap at the realization.

“Let's go,” Thassarian told him.

“Like hell,” Koltira spat, setting his feet anyway. “I will _never_ fight for the Scourge!”

“You don't have a choice,” Thassarian snapped back. “You belong to us, now. Do you think anyone else will even tolerate you like this?”

Koltira snarled and threw himself to the side, trying to break Thassarian's grip. He couldn't quite manage it, but he was able to drag Thassarian to the side with him, causing the human to stumble slightly even as his hand tightened down around Koltira's neck.

It wasn't enough. Koltira stumbled under Thassarian's awkward weight, and Thassarian was quicker to regain his footing. When he did, he hauled Koltira upright again with a jerk hard enough that it wrenched several of the muscles in the elf's neck with a muted twinge of pain.

“You have nowhere and no one else to run to,” Thassarian told him, his voice shaking with fury. “And we won't let you try. You are undead, Koltira,” he growled. “You are Scourge, now.”

The words were hard and cold—a stone cage with no windows, built from bitter truth and wretched betrayal. Koltira shook too much with the weight of them to fling himself away a second time.

“Only because of what you've done to me,” he hissed, his voice seething with condemnation. “I belong to the Scourge only because you were the one who dragged me into this hell, Thassarian!”

Thassarian's hand twitched at the words, and somehow the reaction made Koltira even angrier. He jerked to the side again, and this time Thassarian let him break free. The human’s face was hard, his eyes flat and narrowed as Koltira backed away from him.

The cultist woman shifted in Koltira's peripheral. He ignored the mortal; she was not the target of the fury he felt boiling up again in his throat.

“I wonder if you were the one who branded me, too,” he spat at Thassarian. “Did they _force_ that on you, as well? Did you have _no choice_ but to mark me like one of your farm animals, Thassarian?”

Thassarian's eyes tightened. The line of his mouth went flat and white beneath the wiry hair surrounding it. He said nothing, and did nothing else in retaliation until Koltira lunged for him with a howl.

 _”What have you done?!”_ Koltira shrieked. His vision darkened around the edges; ice sang in his dead arteries as he clawed for Thassarian's throat and found his hands twisted away from their target. That didn't matter; he had teeth, and they were sharp enough and his jaw strong enough now to chew through flesh and tendon, and he lunged again to try—

—and screamed as the world erupted into agony again, dropping him to the ground under its weight and grinding through him like a thousand, thousand superheated shards of ice until he had no more air to scream and no more will to try.

It passed slowly this time, and when it had finally faded from him Koltira lay trembling again at Thassarian's feet. Drool ran from the corner of his mouth to pool beneath his cheek in the blighted dirt. No hands came to help him up this time; none of the feet surrounding him shifted towards him.

But everyone watched him. He knew it—could feel their eyes boring down at him. Was that all he was, now? A moment's entertainment until the punishments grew too much to bear and he fell in line and obeyed?

The dead did not weep. Neither did Koltira, not now. He had nothing left to give, no fire to burn out, no fury to push him onward. They had crushed it from him.

“What have you done to me?” he asked, his voice hollow and small.

 _He_ came again, a great weight that settled around each of Koltira's bones and squeezed the wind from his rotted lungs even as he whimpered and shrank closer against the ground. _He_ came—and He answered in a voice that cracked like ice.

 _ **Only what you asked for,**_ He whispered. The sound stabbed at the inside of Koltira's skull until he yelped with the pain of it. _**Only what you prayed for, in your suffering. Who did you think would answer when your thoughts turned to the God of Undeath, Koltira? Who did you think I was?**_

He didn't let Koltira raise his hands. He didn't let the elf try to rise or drag himself away from where He kept him pinned. When Koltira made the mistake of sobbing, He crushed the air from him again and laughed.

_**You longed for undeath, little elf. You wanted the release it would bring you from having to feel anymore. You** _ **begged** _**to be made undead—and I have answered you.** _

He left—truly left, and the absence was so pronounced this time that it was another blow all on its own.

Koltira fell limp and did not rise until Thassarian pulled him to his feet again. He did not fight as he was led away from the cage. He did not fight being measured for a new suit of armor; he did not argue against being given his old gear to wear until the new had been fashioned.

When a sword brimming with foul magic was thrust into his hand and the contact aroused a sudden, gnawing desire to break and kill, Koltira accepted it—embraced it, and fell numbly in line as Thassarian led him to a gathering of Scourge forces at the center of the camp.

There was no more reason to fight what had been done. He had asked for this, after all.

✴

The refugees from the neighboring village arrived in Stillriver Sanctuary during the night: A ragged sea of faces and dimmed arcane lamps that lit their way only a little—too dim to give them away in the forest, for they had learned through bitter experience how silently the Scourge could move. They were shepherded by what few rangers and healers the sanctuary had been willing to spare, and all of these were hardened and unlikely to shatter under interrogation. The sanctuary was the only safe haven this far south; it must be protected, even if a few willing lives must be sacrificed to do so.

Faltora was one of the soldiers watching the gate when the refugees came. Their muffled weeping and clumsy footsteps gave them away long before they came into view. Faltora and his fellows held themselves ready as the group approached, keeping their hands on their weapons in case this was a trick. Some of the undead had proven capable of imitating the living; Faltora’s captain had been fooled by one such ruse, and Faltora and his comrades had been unable to recover the body before it was ripped to pieces and devoured by the swarm of ghouls that had come after.

This night, thankfully, their caution proved unwarranted: All who approached the sanctuary were living still, and although their injuries ranged wildly in severity all appeared otherwise hale and whole.

None bore bite marks or the unnaturally darkened veins that betrayed the presence of plague in their blood. Faltora wondered which of the rangers shepherding these villagers had been the one to put down the infected.

There were a mother and her young son amidst the group; the boy was a redhead, and still small and soft with youth. His mother carried him close to her, though he seemed a bit too large anymore for it.

Faltora couldn't say he blamed her for her coddling. It was a miracle the boy had survived long enough to have been brought to Stillriver; Faltora had seen far too many children slain and desecrated in the last few weeks.

The newcomers were herded into shelters that had once been houses and shops; the dwindling space available meant that they were split into multiple smaller groups, though families were allowed to remain together. The weeping and stifled sounds of pain slowly dwindled as the refugees settled in amongst the elves who had already occupied this place for several days.

The guard changed soon after, when the first dim light of dawn began to illuminate the horizon. Faltora sank down onto his bedroll with a long, hollow sigh; no matter how many minutes of sleep he was afforded (and they were seldom enough at a time to become an hour,) the exhaustion of being hunted within his own homeland bore down on him like a physical weight, dragging at his feet and crushing him down against the earth when he was allowed to rest.

It didn't help that his thoughts refused to buckle under the strain that bore down upon the rest of him; no matter how weary he might be, his mind was in a constant blur. What sleep he could get was plagued with the shadows of the atrocities he had seen in the last many days, and his waking moments were haunted with anxieties that he refused to acknowledge even as the fear they brought chewed at his insides.

He had not seen Koltira since the runestones had been defeated. His older brother had been sent away with the rest of Ranger-Lord Brightwing’s rangers to harry the invading undead and clear out the villages that laid before the relentless march of the Scourge. There had been no farewell between them; Faltora’s own squadron was mobilized at the same time, and the brothers had not been together when the call to arms had been issued.

The Scourge were stopped for now, and Faltora could only hope that meant the rangers and the soldiers and magi who had gone to aid them were proving successful—or at the very least staying alive and out of enemy hands.

 _Surely you wouldn't let yourself be captured by a bunch of shambling corpses?_ he thought. _They can't even walk properly! What sort of ranger can't outrun a ghoul?_

Koltira would probably laugh at the idea—and then toss Faltora in the nearby river for making such a comment. Warriors they both may be, but his older brother still had the advantage of a few decades’ training and experience on Faltora. Most of their scuffles tended to end with Faltora flat on his—

A woman's scream shattered the quiet and Faltora was on his feet, sword in hand and racing outside with the other soldiers and rangers as all thoughts save one fled his mind: _Protect._

Stillriver had transformed. Priests and priestesses herded civilians inside the best-fortified buildings of the sanctuary, shouting at them to bar the doors and remain inside at all costs. Soldiers stood along the eastern edge of the settlement, weapons at the ready; magi lingered farther back, their hands already crackling with magic. Faltora saw only one of the rangers, and then only briefly as the man slipped away into a sheltered area, an arrow already knocked on his bow.

Faltora raced to join the other soldiers, following their gazes as he did so. What undead rabble had discovered them, and how—?

He jerked to a stop. His heart dropped down into his stomach, and ice flooded through his empty chest.

There, atop the rise across the river, a vast portion of the Scourge had gathered. At their head rode Arthas Menethil—and he laughed as he watched the elves of Stillriver Sanctuary mobilize.

“Is this all?” the bastard prince asked. “With as much trouble as we've had finding this little hovel, I'd expected a stronger fighting force than a handful of beaten-down elves in battered armor.”

None of the elves stirred at the insult—save Faltora, who ground his teeth together until they ached and dearly wished the human pig would dismount and come taunt them within stabbing range. The lack of response didn't appear to phase Arthas in the slightest as he turned his skeletal beast about and rode a few paces to the side.

“Since you take such pleasure in impeding our progress,” he said, beckoning to someone behind him, “we thought it might be time to remind you how futile your efforts are.”

There was movement from behind the Scourge champion; as the defenders of Stillriver watched on, four elven men were shoved into view. Each was accompanied by a necromancer and one of the undead, and each had his arms bound at eye level on either side of his head by a heavy wooden bar secured with metal locks. The rangers had been stripped down to their undergarments, and their bodies already bore bruises and gashes visible even at this distance.

“Not even your rangers can hide from us forever.” Arthas laughed as the prisoners were brought to a stop and bound in place with spells cast by the necromancers.

Faltora’s stomach knotted—but he didn't see any blonds among the group. Perhaps Koltira had escaped after all. Surely he must have—

One of the undead guarding the rangers turned and dragged its rotted claws through the flesh of the nearest elf's chest, drawing a ragged cry from the man as blood poured from the fresh gouges it left. Faltora gritted his teeth and forced himself to remain still.

“They couldn't even keep this place a secret,” Arthas declared, his voice carrying over the stifled sounds still coming from the ranger. “They led us straight to your little sanctuary. Really,” he added with a wave of his hand, “we're doing you a favor.”

That was a signal; the other undead moved in, some brandishing weapons and tools and others baring claws and broken teeth as they closed with the captive rangers.

A volley of arrows sprang from the shadows of Stillriver Sanctuary as the prisoners’ fellow rangers fired on the Scourge. Some of the shafts were alight with flame; others burned green or violet with magic meant to poison and rot whoever they struck. Even the undead were not immune to such spells.

Those arrows should have struck their targets and proven as much. Instead, the elves of Stillriver watched in dismay as each bolt suddenly veered off course well before they could reach the undead, instead turning up or to the sides to fall harmlessly in the dirt and surrounding trees.

Arthas laughed again. “Did you think we wouldn't come prepared for your arrows?” he asked. “My necromancers are capable of more than just raising your dead—but, by all means, keep wasting your efforts.”

Magic electrified the air around Faltora, and he and the other soldiers stepped back as the magi gathered with them took up the next assault. Some wove spells and fired projectiles to weaken and batter the Scourge barrier; at the same time, an iridescent wall rose up before the Stillriver elves, shielding them from the handful of destroying spells and poisoned bolts the Scourge began to fire at them. Magic clashed on both sides of the river, each side's attacks splashing against the other's shield with a cacophony of shrieks and hard claps.

Faltora was used to harsher sounds than this, though the chaos made his ears ring and his eyes water. He stood steady, sword still in hand as he watched and waited. The Stillriver magi were doing well, but they were vastly outnumbered by the Scourge spellcasters. There was only one way this could end.

A group of Scourge spells struck the Stillriver barrier simultaneously, and the barrier buckled towards the elves with a sound like glass cracking. Those magi who were engaged in assaulting the Scourge barrier shifted their focus, throwing what magic they had left into their own shield.

The Scourge spells stopped. Their barrier remained erect and showed no signs of breaking down, but the Stillriver barrier came under no further fire.

Faltora didn't have time to wonder at this before the undead fell upon the captured rangers.

More than one Stillriver defender cried out, and more arrows and more spells rocketed towards the Scourge barrier as the men were slowly, systematically torn to pieces. Their screams never broke or faded; if anything, they grew louder and more frantic as more flesh was carved away from them and their bones were shattered in the hands of their tormentors.

“They're being kept awake,” someone hissed behind Faltora. Another fireball shot past him and flew up to splash uselessly against the Scourge barrier.

Nothing worked; spell after arrow collided with the smoky, sickly-gray wall, and still it held steady as the torture continued. Faltora gritted his teeth, unable to look away and wishing desperately that he could. One ranger's screams were silenced as a ghoul ripped his head back and bit off a massive chunk of flesh from his throat; another shrieked as a skeleton dug its fingers into his back and ripped something out with the sound of bones shattering.

There was an outcry from the shadows, and Faltora turned to watch two of the Stillriver rangers leap forward and charge towards the river with their blades drawn.

“Don't—!” Faltora wasn't the only elf to call after them, but they heeded no one—and magic fell from the Scourge ranks to strike them down, rotting the flesh from their bones as they fell screaming to the ground.

“Oh good—willing recruits.” How did Arthas’ voice carry so well over the screams? “Anyone else?”

No one moved, save the magi as they flung more strength into their barrier. The skeletons of the two fallen rangers dragged themselves up again and turned to face the Stillriver elves, blades up in the guard position and empty eye sockets burning with blue fire.

The torture dragged on and on; by the time the screams had ceased, the sun had cleared the horizon and golden light illuminated the battered remains of the captured rangers.

Faltora gritted his teeth as the carcasses were tossed unceremoniously to the ground. He knew what would come next, and so it was no surprise to see ghouls raised from what was left of the dead elves. That didn't make witnessing it and being unable to stop it any less galling.

“Bring out the woman.”

Faltora’s attention snapped back to Arthas as he motioned again to his army. He couldn't be serious…

A female elf was shoved forward by a pair of death knights; though she was bloodied and bruised like the men before her, she fought ferociously against her guards, snarling and setting her feet awkwardly as they bullied her to the edge of the rise. Her arms were bound behind her back, and she was wrapped in a piece of bloodied cotton that only barely preserved her dignity, making it easy to see the deformities in her lower legs. They must have been broken and then intentionally healed at such odd angles.

One of the death knights began to release the woman's arms; his fellow grabbed the woman's hair and ripped her head back so that her face was laid bare for the Stillriver elves to see. Her features were bruised and swollen… but there was no mistaking the dark, ugly scars that littered her face.

Faltora’s stomach gave a hard lurch. The other rangers he hadn't been certain of, but he knew Nithiriel had belonged to the same company as Koltira.

Necromancers bound the woman, using spells to drag her arms straight out at her sides. Still she struggled, shrieking obscenities as one of the death knights ripped away the cotton, leaving her bare before the onlooking elves.

More arrows fired from the shadows; these gleamed with a sicklier hue, and landed hard in the ground just before the Scourge barrier. Where they struck, the earth blackened and crumbled; the barrier seemed to stop at ground level, and so Faltora was certain it would do nothing to stop the drying rot from spreading onward towards the Scourge.

The death knights and necromancers remained where they stood, completely unconcerned with the creeping destruction. Faltora supposed there must be little room for fear among the—

There came a hideous hissing sound, and in its wake a great shadow swept down along the slope, drowning and devouring the rangers’ poison in an inky wave of blackness so deep that it hurt to look at for more than a moment. The earth foamed and seemed to devour itself at the edges of the shadow; plants withered and died and became dust within a matter of seconds when it touched them.

Again the Stillriver magi reinforced the barrier surrounding the defenders—but the shadow stopped and vanished into the ground before it reached the river. Faltora reached out as far as he could, feeling for the hideous magic, and found no trace of it. It must have dissipated… or else now lay dormant, a trap ready to be sprung by unwary feet or magic.

Nithiriel’s screams brought Faltora’s attention back to the top of the rise, and his was not the only voice that rose in horror as Arthas himself began to hack at her, dismounted now and wielding a blade that looked elvish in its make. He aimed high, and with a lurch Faltora realized the Scourge champion was chopping at one of her wrists, swinging the blade and jerking it free again almost carelessly even as he began to cut through the bones.

Finally, with a wet crack, Nithiriel’s hand came free and fell to the ground. The woman screamed until Faltora’s ears rang with the sound… but she didn't bleed from that wrist. Magic surrounded the stump, staunching it so that she could not bleed to death.

Arthas stepped around and put his foot down hard as he moved to hack at the other hand; even from so far away, Faltora could hear the wet snaps and crunches of the severed hand being crushed.

Arthas leaned towards Nithiriel for a moment, grinning as he said something too low to hear. Then he laughed and backhanded her hard across the face when she began to howl a furious string of obscenities at him.

Faltora’s vision darkened at the edges as he watched Arthas hack at the woman's other hand. Dimly he heard the elves around him begin to shout and curse the bastard prince, and he watched almost numbly as again and again the magi and rangers sent volleys at the Scourge barrier, all to no avail. The barrier held. Arthas didn't even flinch at the onslaught.

Nithiriel’s remaining hand fell away, and her feet followed in a messier fashion; she wasn't suspended high enough to make the work of removing her feet easy for Arthas.

His work apparently finished, Arthas stepped back and flicked the blade, sending scarlet ribbons flying to the ground. Nithiriel trembled from the shock of her wounds, bound still above the ground; then, as she began to take a deep, shuddering breath to still herself, the magic keeping her suspended was dispelled, sending her tumbling gracelessly to the ground at Arthas’ feet.

Nithiriel immediately began to crawl, half-weeping as she cursed the Scourge and their champion in Thalassian.

Arthas only laughed; when he stepped aside to let the woman pass, Faltora did not allow himself to hope. Perhaps that was why he didn't feel quite as gutted as he should have when Arthas brought the bloodied sword down again and chopped into one of Nithiriel’s legs. This time the blade stuck fast into bones; Arthas gave it a hard tug, and when that only dislodged the sword a little he set a foot down against Nithiriel’s back and twisted until, with a painful shriek, the sword snapped in two.

Faltora didn't realize he'd started forward until a hand clamped down around his arm, hauling him back in line. Somewhere a faintly familiar voice spat at him to stay put. He wasn't sure why he obeyed… but obey he did, even as another blade was brought for Arthas to continue his vicious game.

Little by little, he cut away at Nithiriel’s limbs, laughing over her shrieks and pinning her down with his foot so that she could not drag herself away. She didn't bleed, or if she did it wasn't a great loss. The cultists were talented, indeed, to keep such a wretched prisoner alive through all of this.

Arthas finally stepped back, his second blade still dripping with blood as he looked down at Nithiriel as though she was some interesting, half-solved puzzle. The woman had fallen quiet by now, though not silent; she still whimpered feebly, and what remained of her body shook hard enough that she nearly seemed to writhe against the ground—from pain or terror, Faltora couldn't be sure anymore.

“I've made a worm of you, little elf.” This time Arthas spoke loudly enough that everyone gathered could hear him. "I have destroyed your body, and none of your fellows could stop me."

Nithiriel began to lift her head; as if the movement was a cue, Arthas kicked her onto her back and planted his foot against her chest, pressing down until she began to wheeze and rasp audibly with each breath.

“Even the strongest of your warriors cannot stand up to the might of the Scourge,” Arthas declared, turning a savage look on the Stillriver elves. “If you continue to stand in our way, you will be broken as they have been.”

Faltora’s stomach filled with ice as he leaned back, away from the rise. Two of the magi beside him balked, and one soldier backed away several steps as the Stillriver barrier shivered in response.

Arthas saw their resolve falter and grinned like a slavering warg in the face of it as he continued, “Let this wretch be an example: If you choose to stand against us, you will be destroyed.”

He turned and dragged the point of the sword down the line of the woman's gut. Nithiriel’s shriek was long and thin, but not loud enough to mask the sounds that followed, of blood spilling and black magic sweeping in to keep her alive.

Arthas thrust his blade into the broken earth and knelt down, still pinning his victim with a foot as he reached in and pulled—

Faltora started to cry out, only to choke on a swell of bile as Arthas dragged a length of the woman's intestines free. If others reacted similarly, Faltora did not know; the scene before him, the sounds Nithiriel made as she thrashed beneath the bastard prince were all he knew. He could not look away. He could not. He could not, Light, he couldn't look away, _Light…_

Suddenly, impossibly, Nithiriel’s shrieks grew even more intense, more frenzied, and several of the Stillriver elves screamed as they watched the ghouls that had once been her fellow rangers fall on the pile Arthas left on the ground beside her—and then upon Nithiriel herself when Arthas stood and stepped aside. Faltora gagged and brought a fist against his mouth to keep from vomiting at the sight.

The screaming did not stop, not even when bones began to crack. One ghoul climbed _inside_ the cavity of her body and still Nithiriel screamed, still she struggled, still, _still,_ until at last the feeding undead ripped her head from her body and in their frenzy knocked it, rolling, into Arthas’ foot.

The champion studied her head for a time as the ghouls began to fight over what little meat remained; then, as though reaching to retrieve some interesting rock from the ground, he bent down and grabbed Nithiriel’s head by the hair, and lifted it high above his own so that her face was visible to the elves of Stillriver Sanctuary.

From where she hung, Nithiriel—now nothing more than a ravaged head—opened her eyes and let her jaw drop in a wordless scream.

Faltora vomited; it was the splash of his vomit against his face that told him he had hit his knees on the ground. Blood roared in his ears, colliding and clashing with the sounds of screams and shouts and racing feet and shattering spellwork. The world spun in a flurry of movement—of soldiers drawing blades and magi weeping and men and women struggling with each other, against each other, cursing, shouting, begging—

There was an almighty crunch, and Faltora vomited again at a mage’s shriek: _“HER HEAD!”_

Hands dragged him upright, and he let them, weak and clumsy with horror. Was he being taken prisoner? Would they crush him, too…?

A hand struck him hard across the face, shocking him back from the shadows in time to hear one of his fellows curse him for a fool.

“The others!” the man was hissing. “Wake up, you coward, the others! We must go!”

Others…?

His fellow soldier snarled, and gripping Faltora by the arm turned to haul him away from the rise—

**“SILENCE.”**

Blackness swept down to crush him.

When his vision cleared again he found himself belly-down beneath the other soldier, who lay unmoving atop Faltora as though he had flung himself between his fellow elf and some horrendous explosion. Only when Faltora shoved at the other man did he stir and sluggishly drag himself upright again.

The other elves of Stillriver were in no better shape; a woman lay near Faltora, her eyes half-lidded and blood trickling from her nose as she blinked and stared dazedly ahead. Beyond her lay an elderly mage, folded on his side and unresponsive as two of his fellows shook him frantically.

“Is this the best you mongrels have left to offer?” Arthas’ voice fell across the scattered defenders like hail; Faltora shuddered and reached blindly for his discarded sword even as he looked up again to watch the pig.

The champion's hands were gloved, but the leather was not dark enough to hide the gore that now dripped from them. Blood splattered the man's face and chest and turned his leached hair scarlet.

“I expected to find soldiers,” Arthas sneered. “You scrambling cowards aren't even fit to serve as ghouls.” He swept an arm out, gesturing yet again to something or someone behind him as he asked, “Have I already taken the best of your kingdom's defenders?”

Faltora found the hilt of a sword and pulled the blade before him as he struggled up onto his knee. His vision wavered dangerously and his ears rang, but whatever spell had knocked him flat had cleared the worst of the horror from his mind, and he could think clearly again. He shut out Nithiriel’s fate and focused on the human pig responsible; others at his sides shifted, seeming to regain their resolve as Faltora did.

Arthas watched the elves gather themselves, his face dangerously unreadable now. Faltora saw the cultists and ghouls nearest to Arthas part slightly, but could not hear anyone else approaching. In the sudden stillness of the morning, surely he should be able to hear some indication that someone or something was approaching. Even the cultists were not graceful enough to move softly—

“I have already raised the first of my high elven death knights,” Arthas continued. “Surely there are others among you who are worthy of the honor.”

The elf that stepped up beside him was a sullen, dispassionate figure, tall and lithe in build, and had hair nearly as pale as the fallen prince's. He wielded a massive, garish blade that glowed with vile magic—but his armor was that of a high elven ranger, and the face…

Faltora choked out a cry and staggered up onto his feet; his sword hung loosely in his hand, all but forgotten as he jerked forward a step. Blood roared in his ears, and the sound of it was low and hollow as he stared up at the pale figure above him.

It couldn't be.

It _couldn't_ be.

“Koltira?” Faltora had to fight to force the name from his throat, and the sound of it left him feeling bloodied and raw as it passed into the morning air.

The figure turned at the name, and the blank set to his features faltered as recognition and then horror flitted across his face. There were scars across his face that should not be, and his skin was drained of color and his ears mutilated, but it _was…_

Faltora sobbed and staggered back. His foot caught on something and he could not recover, and he fell hard to the ground, dropping his sword again as he looked on his brother. His brother, his _brother_ —

There was a laugh, and slowly Faltora recognized it as belonging to Arthas. The sound made him flinch; he thought, he hoped he saw Koltira respond in kind.

“You recognize him,” Arthas said. His words sounded distant and soft even as they rang cacophonously in Faltora’s ears. “Good. See how I've raised him above the rest of you, and know you could have joined him.”

Koltira was leaning back. No one else could tell; no one else knew him like Faltora, no one else had spent a lifetime beside him, no one else _knew_ him—only Faltora could tell he was cringing away. Only Faltora could see the horror written in the lines of his brother's body. Only Faltora could _see_ him, and he wished he was not so paralyzed that he couldn't bring his hands up to gouge away the sight of _his brother_ so twisted…

He watched as Arthas turned to Koltira. He watched Koltira turn in kind, fluid as a puppet on strings, and regard Arthas with a look that only Faltora knew to be beseeching.

Arthas grinned. One gloved hand, still dripping with gore, swept out towards Faltora in a mocking invitation.

And Koltira descended the rise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I DON'T KNOW HOW THIS KEEPS GETTING LONGER. HELP ME.


	6. .

Koltira's body moved without him, drawn forward by strings he could neither see nor break, and he could not even open his mouth to scream as he slid down the rise and approached the river's edge.

The water did not stop him; controlled by a will other than his own, Koltira's hand stretched out towards the river. Magic blasted down his arm and out through his palm, and the water froze where the spell touched it, creating a narrow bridge of thick, unmoving ice for him to cross.

The elves of Stillriver Sanctuary scrambled as he approached, some swiping up weapons or readying magic while others fled outright, dragging their unconscious fellows along with them as they sought shelter deeper within the settlement. Some, he knew, were off to evacuate the civilians.

He shrieked within his own mind, fighting to control his body again. He couldn't go down there, he couldn't attack them, these were his _people—!_

The skeletons guarding the Stillriver side of the water stepped aside to let him pass, their blades still held in the guard position as they kept their eyeless sockets trained on the mortals ahead. Koltira wanted to turn away from the sight of them, to recoil at the stink of rotted meat still clinging to them. He wanted to reach out and shatter both of them, but his body did not respond.

He heard the arrows loosed upon him well before he saw them, and he cursed his ears and his training even as an arm raised itself and more magic shot from him, swirling this time around him to deflect every bolt.

 _Run away!_ he wanted to scream—to the rangers who fired on him, to his brother, to the soldier who stood between them even as he cursed Faltora’s failure to flee with the others. Koltira howled and tore at the walls of his own mind, but his body continued on, calm and frigid like the brewing of a winter storm.

_What's the matter, Koltira?_

A scream he couldn't give voice to choked Koltira as he advanced on the elves before him; it was _Arthas_ invading his mind now, crawling inside and seeing everything, knowing everything—

Faltora’s comrade threw himself forward with a roar, elvish blade raised to strike.

He was slow. Too slow. His arm—too low, too tense. His body was unbalanced; his feet were set well, but his center of gravity was off. Koltira saw and knew all of this in the space between the elf's first footstep and the second; hundreds of years of experience had honed him, shaped him, and that had not left him in death. He saw, he understood, he knew how to counter this, how to turn it against his opponent. He could disarm this man easily, turn him harmlessly aside—

Ice seemed to wrap around Koltira's eyes, around their nerves, burning and freezing them as Arthas looked _through_ them, and again Koltira felt himself shudder against the urge to scream as the human pig’s assessment of the oncoming threat drained through his mind like thick slime.

He didn't look for openings. The elf's entire body was an opening; his blade meant nothing against Koltira's new strength, and his armor might as well be rice paper. His flesh would be easier still to tear, the bones more easily broken than dry wood. No, Arthas sought out the different ways to kill this man, to make an example of him—and there were many, many ways.

Koltira could shatter his windpipe and let him suffocate. He could break the soldier's knee against its natural rotation and shatter his skull with the next blow. He could rip flesh from his unguarded throat and let him drown or bleed out; he could send his own blade into the man's gut with enough force to pierce him cleanly through, or lop off a limb, or slash his eyes out…

Koltira couldn't stop himself. He couldn't call out any warning, couldn't give any sign of what was coming. He could only watch himself react as Arthas willed him to, knocking away the soldier's blade with one hand and snapping the other out to take the elf by the jaw and lift him off the ground. Koltira twisted with the soldier's momentum, turning and slamming the elf down in an instant that was too fast and too slow and too _clear,_ and when the soldier's bones shattered under Koltira's weight he felt every single fissure, every crack, every separation of teeth from gums and shard from shard of bone.

And through it all—through the span of seconds it took to kill the soldier—there was Arthas, _laughing_ in Koltira's mind as bone gave way to flesh beneath Koltira's hand.

“Koltira, no!” Faltora shouted, and Koltira wanted to vomit at the horror of what he had done, what Faltora had watched him do—

 _Horror is for the living, elf,_ Arthas sneered. _Now get up and take care of the other one._

Again Koltira moved against his will, and now he fought more ferociously than ever as his body rose and turned to face Faltora. Memories dredged themselves up, unbidden, unwanted, and Koltira screamed in the depths of his own mind as he felt Arthas scan through each and every one of them, fouling them, desecrating them with his own reactions to every second he uncovered. Nothing remained hidden; none of Koltira's defenses stood against Arthas, nothing he tried not to think of was too far out of the pig’s reach, and he _saw._

 _Your brother?_ Arthas cackled, and Koltira was forced to feel his glee even as his own mind recoiled from it. _Then he should be given a proper demonstration of your new power._

Koltira's legs brought him forward; his body tightened and coiled down, ready to lunge the moment Faltora moved— _if_ he ever moved.

Faltora wasn't moving. He stood stock-still, face twisted in horror, eyes wide, sword half-raised towards the guard position and Koltira shrieked at him from the back of his mind as the distance between them shrank from yards to feet: _Move! MOVE!_

An arrow came whistling towards Koltira, and his arm shot up and around to knock it aside. The burning magic surrounding the arrowhead tore away his bracer, filling the air with the stench of charred leather as the bolt ricocheted away. That was wrong; the bracer alone shouldn't have stopped the magic, not even accounting for such brief contact. He remembered learning the same spell; he remembered watching it work against trolls and even other undead—

 _ **Weaker** undead,_ Arthas said, and Koltira wished he could cringe away from the flash of twisted pride that colored the declaration—not for Koltira, but for the concept of death knights, for their continued existence. They weren't even his creation, and that colored the pride, turned it darker still with something slavering and unsatisfied, like a well-fed hound eyeing its master's food.

Koltira jerked to a stop, and magic blasted overhead from the Scourge camp, seething and choking the air with the stench of necromancy as the cultists fired another volley at the Stillriver elves. Without a barrier to protect them this time, the defenders were left to scatter out of the way; those who failed to do so met the same grisly fate as the first two rangers, and soon a small clutch of skeleton guards had formed a loose wall behind Faltora, their blades turned towards the rest of the defenders to prevent any aid from coming to their fellow soldier.

Faltora still hadn't moved. His eyes were locked on Koltira.

 _Then **make** him move,_ Arthas growled.

Koltira's body lurched forward again, the great runeblade rising as he tightened down in preparation to attack. Faltora followed the blade with his eyes, but even still refused to move.

“Don't do this,” the living elf said. His voice would have sounded flat, almost unconcerned to any other listener. Koltira heard the despair there and raged in silence at the sound of it as he was made to leap forward.

His runeblade met Faltora’s sword in a parry that made both elves’ ears ring. Koltira felt himself pull back, watched himself hack again and again at Faltora and watched his brother counter or dodge each swing readily. He couldn't feel any hope; he could see each blow forced Faltora back, sometimes by centimeters, sometimes by whole steps. He could feel the strength put behind each swing of the runeblade, could feel the boundless energy in his rotted body. Faltora would quickly tire under an assault this merciless—but Koltira would not.

Again Koltira strained against Arthas’ control—and suddenly that control was gone, and Koltira staggered, thrusting his sword arm forward mid-swing to try to keep his balance. Horror flared through him as he felt and watched the runeblade slip past Faltora’s defense and through a gap in the armor to slice through the gambeson underneath.

Faltora spat and leapt back; blood dribbled from his side and made a thin trail across the ground.

Laughter filled Koltira's mind as Arthas resumed control over him—resumed, not regained, for now Koltira understood what the human pig had done and why.

 _I only let you have a little more autonomy._ Arthas even had the gall to sound offended. _You seemed so eager to take an active part in the fight._

“You don't have to do this,” Faltora insisted, wincing at the cut in his side. “You can fight him, Koltira! You have to fight him!”

 _Are **all** of you like this?_ Arthas made his disgust known by sending Koltira forward again, even more viciously than before. Faltora parried another blow, but only barely, and he buckled badly under the weight of it. Koltira drew back and lunged forward again, and again the runeblade chopped into Faltora’s side, worsening the wound there and drawing a ragged cry from the living elf that set Koltira's teeth on edge.

He was weakening. Koltira noticed it for himself, saw it alongside Arthas, and something dark curled in his gut at the realization as Faltora flung himself out of range again. The mortal man was losing strength with every drop of blood, and there was a wider streak of it now across the ground, cutting across the little trail from before. The wound wasn't enough on its own to kill him; the flow of it down the outside of Faltora’s armor wouldn't be an inch-thin trickle if he was mortally injured.

 _Exciting, isn't it?_ Arthas asked, and the knot in Koltira's gut shuddered in response.

A great cry went up from behind Faltora, and both combatants turned and watched as a stream of elves charged the line of skeletons. Some of the battered men and women who had scattered earlier were among their number, but the majority of the warriors were fresh, their armor clean and their eyes too bright with fury to have borne witness to the executions moments ago.

For an instant, something like despair flooded through Koltira, and within the confines of his own mind he screamed at the brave fools for not fleeing when he had the chance. Even if they cut down the skeletons, the whole of the Scourge army lay in wait across the river, with only a small handful visible from the sanctuary. The rest were surely farther back, awaiting Arthas’ command to push forward once the sanctuary had been flattened. There could be no hope of victory for the Stillriver elves—surely they had to understand that! This would be nothing more than a diversion for the Scourge, a distraction spanning maybe a handful of minutes at best—

_Oh._

Despair turned suddenly to a grim, fierce love for the soldiers before him. They _were_ committing suicide… so that the civilians hidden here could have the chance to escape while the Scourge were distracted. Their damnation would ensure the others’ salvation.

 _Or,_ Arthas chuckled, _it might have._

The Scourge champion laughed at the horror that washed through Koltira, then turned and regarded the soldiers surrounding him atop the rise.

“Orbaz,” he said, “go down there and deal with those insects. The skeletons won't be enough on their own, and I'm tired of playing with them.”

Orbaz’ features twisted into a hideous grin as he saluted Arthas and growled, “Yes, sir.” Then he turned, loosed the massive battle axe strapped to his back, and started down the hill with all the murderous intent of a wolf on the hunt.

Arthas watched him go, grinning at the carnage the death knight's purposeful gait promised. He waited a moment, then featured without looking away and said, “Thassarian.”

Thassarian stepped forward without hesitation, and stood at attention as he awaited Arthas’ orders. The worst had already been done; there was no more reason to disobey the Scourge champion. There was nothing more to be protected.

“That little suicide charge is meant to be a distraction,” Arthas told him without preamble. “The rest of the Stillriver elves are trying to evacuate the civilians right under our noses.”

The fallen prince turned and fixed Thassarian with a hard stare. “Take whatever fighters you think you'll need and _deal_ with them.”

Thassarian did not feel his stomach drop. He did not consider the potential presence of elvish children a cruelty. When he saluted Arthas, the gesture was smart and without emotion.

“There will be no survivors,” he swore. He meant every word.

Arthas smiled.

“Keep a few alive,” Arthas told him. “Civilian or not, I don't care. Just bring back four or five live prisoners. Slaughter the rest and raise them.”

Again Thassarian saluted, unmoved, unfeeling. The force he gathered around him were varyingly animated by comparison; the banshees seemed ready to unleash their anguished screams at any moment, while the necromancers and the handful of conscious, relatively coherent zombies he selected seemed eager to find themselves in the thick of battle again.

He chose no other death knights. He didn't dare do anything more to cause Arthas to consider him unfit to serve. If Koltira were left to fend for himself now—

One death knight would suffice. Thassarian would not share this slaughter with his brothers-in-arms.

He had turned and taken three steps towards the rise, his band of undead following behind him, when Arthas called out: “And, Thassarian?”

Thassarian stopped and turned attentively, neither dreading what new order may come, nor despising Arthas for drawing these orders out as though they were part of some game. His was not to question—only to obey.

“Yes, my lord?” Thassarian asked.

 _Now_ Arthas grinned, once more a warg with the scent of blood in its nostrils as he said, “If there are any children down there, keep them alive, especially.”

Thassarian did not question this order; he merely nodded his agreement. And as he lead his group down the rise, he did not allow his gaze to travel to Koltira, even for an instant.

It did not matter.

 

Koltira couldn't move to stop the death knight who charged past him, past Faltora and the now scattered skeletons to throw himself into the Stillriver elves—but the instant Faltora turned towards the carnage behind him, Koltira's hand shot out and latched onto the front of his brother's chest plate, then dragged Faltora around, nearly flinging him off his feet before he was able to tear himself away.

“You have a more pressing concern, brother.” Koltira said—his voice, his words, but he hadn't chosen to say the sentiment aloud. Arthas could even force him to speak; despair chewed at Koltira's gut again.

Faltora snarled and leapt forward, pressing the attack now and putting Koltira on the defensive. Arthas hadn't expected Faltora to go on the offense; Koltira let the human bastard feel the full brunt of his mockery even as his body continued to act on its own.

 _You thought he would cower from me?_ Koltira sneered. _He'd sooner die than leave me like this._

He was prepared for agony to course through him again, but Arthas only laughed and said, _What a shame you're so much harder to break than Faltora._

Faltora swung his blade wildly now, determination beginning to give way to desperation in his features—until one sudden stab finally sailed through his defense and gouged a line into the side of the elder brother's neck. Koltira registered a dull flash of pain and the cool, sluggish ooze of ichor from the wound, but it wasn't enough even to slow the death knight down. It certainly wasn't enough to prevent Koltira from knocking Faltora aside with a backhanded blow that sent the living elf tumbling to the side in a cloud of dust.

Faltora wasn't given the chance to drag himself upright again; Koltira charged forward with a snarl, runeblade raised again to strike, and Faltora only had enough time to roll onto his back and fling his own sword up to counter the oncoming blow. The blades met with a tortured screech, and Faltora’s arms nearly buckled as Koltira bore down on him, but both he and the elvish blade managed to hold up long enough to twist aside and send Koltira's sword crashing down into the ground.

Faltora followed his own momentum and leapt back to his feet to strike before Koltira could free his runeblade from the crater he'd carved into the earth. Koltira's vision blurred, and his hand snapped out to blast Faltora with a hail of icy shards.

Faltora cried out and stumbled back, his face and arms torn by the sudden assault. By the time he recovered, Koltira had his runeblade free and was swinging on him again, aiming for the mortal’s hip. Again Faltora managed to meet the runeblade with his own sword—

—And with a hellish shriek, the elven blade snapped in two, the broken end spiraling off to land in the dirt. Koltira's sword continued on, slowed only enough by Faltora’s last parry that it carved a shallow gouge into Faltora’s tasset rather than chopping through the man's leg.

Faltora was an elvish soldier; the breaking of his sword did not amount to the loss of the weapon. He plunged what remained of his blade hard into Koltira's left forearm, lodging the weapon between the bones. That was to his detriment; Koltira dropped his runeblade and punched Faltora across the jaw, sending the mortal tumbling away and leaving the broken sword stuck in Koltira's arm.

Koltira ripped the blade from his arm with a grunt and held it up, watching for a moment as his own blackened blood oozed along its ruined edge. Then magic tore through his arm again, and the blade rotted away into a cloud of coarse dust.

“You were a ranger,” Faltora spat. Blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth, and his words were clumsy as he fought to speak around a rapidly swelling cheek. “A warden of the forest and all the life within it. Now you poison and destroy everything you touch.”

Pain flared through Koltira, and if he'd been in control of his body he would have flinched away from his brother's vitriol. _This isn't me!_ he wanted to scream. _I'm not the one doing this!_

 _But you are,_ Arthas whispered. _You're the only one down there who's trying to kill him. Orbaz only just joined you, and he's dealing with the much larger threat. What kind of monster focuses this intensely on killing his own brother?_

Hatred rose in Koltira, choking him, blinding him with blackness. He only dimly heard Faltora’s battle cry; it wasn't until he felt a thin, short knife gouge into the side of his neck that Koltira returned to his senses, just in time to watch himself grab Faltora’s wrist. Faltora wielded a stiletto blade in that hand, and from the look of it, this time he'd managed to plunge the weapon into Koltira up to the hilt.

Odd. Koltira still only felt a dim ache in that side of his neck, and there was no great spray of blood—

Faltora swung on him with his free hand, aiming a blow at Koltira's jaw. It connected—evidently Arthas was again too surprised by Faltora’s resolve to react in a timely manner—but Koltira registered the blow more as a hard slap, enough to knock his head to the side, but not nearly enough to send him reeling away. In the next instant Koltira reached out and knocked Faltora’s free arm away with enough force that something cracked under his hand, drawing a scream from the mortal.

 _Are you beginning to understand, Koltira?_ Arthas’ voice grew low and soft, edging closer to a purr than Koltira had heard even in the moments before his death. _This is the power you could have, if you would only accept what you are now and submit to me._

Again Koltira was distracted, and this time, standing as close as he was, Faltora was able to see it and capitalize on the opportunity. The blow he'd taken to his forearm hadn't been enough to completely immobilize the limb; now Faltora brought both hands into play, first trying to free himself from Koltira's grip and then attempting to drive the blade towards Koltira when it became clear the older elf wouldn't release him. _Something_ had to work; his brother—no, this creature that had _once been_ Koltira—wasn't invulnerable, not even like this.

Koltira let him struggle a moment longer, his features blank ( _too blank,_ Faltora thought, far too blank for the elf he had known.) Then, faster than Faltora could have ever hoped to counter, Koltira snapped the wrist he still held, twisting it so sharply that Faltora was thrown utterly off balance even as his vision went white with the agony.

Dimly he heard the knife fall from his hand and clatter to the ground. Through the tears gathering in his eyes, he saw Koltira move to kick the blade out of range and reacted, swinging a foot around to block Koltira's. That was the next extremity Koltira shattered, this time by bringing his own heel down atop Faltora’s with enough force that the ground beneath them cracked under the impact.

Koltira finally released him then, flinging Faltora away like so much garbage while the younger elf shrieked and scrambled to stay conscious. This was nothing. This was physical pain, and not even the worst he had endured.

(Was it? No. No, it couldn't be. Surely… surely he had known worse than this.)

Faltora shook his head and found himself on his knees, bent forward and resting the weight of his upper half on his good arm—though even that one burned at the pressure he put on its battered bones. His other arm rested limply across the ground, the wrist mangled and bruised. His stomach tightened at the sight, and he didn't allow himself to look down at his injured foot. It was broken beyond usability; that was all he needed to know for now.

Koltira was stalking towards him, his steps slow and measured and… wrong. Wrong, because as seasoned a warrior as he was, Koltira's gait had never been the steady walk of a soldier. Wrong, because Koltira had always slipped about like a prowling lynx—especially when approaching a downed opponent.

 _My brother is dead,_ Faltora told himself, even as another, mewling voice at the back of his mind protested: _They've twisted him. They've made him wrong._

There was a burst of sound as Koltira drew near, and Faltora—certain he was about to die either way—looked away from the death knight to try to see what evils were being visited on the doomed refugees. The human death knight who had bolted past Koltira earlier had already made short work of the Stillriver warriors, and stood surrounded now by shattered skeletons and a fresh horde of gurgling, restless undead, watching as Faltora did for the source of the commotion.

One of the refugees had broken away from the rest: a thin, elderly elf, one of the few elders left, who could no longer hide his age behind the spells and talismans that the elders of their people hoarded like gold. In spite of the walking stick to which he clung, the old man hobbled nearly as swiftly as a human child could run; the desperate, primal need to survive leant him strength and speed, and he was still an elf besides. But his eyes—their gleam nearly colorless in the twilight of his life—bulged with panic, and his weathered, pale face contorted into an expression of supreme terror as he caught sight of the undead gathered before the river.

Behind the old man stalked another of Arthas’ death knights, holding one-handed a bloodied greatsword that gleamed with the same unholy energy as Koltira's.

The elder turned, saw his pursuer, and redoubled his flight with a feeble gasp. Somehow he managed to spot Faltora through the crowd of undead and recognized him as a living defender of their former sanctuary. The realization that help lay beyond a wall of Scourge minions visibly threw the old man, who stumbled in the middle of turning toward his one remaining ally. Panicked and now robbed of his balance, the elder tripped over his own walking stick and went tumbling to the ground with a warbling cry.

Faltora lurched forward and up, scrambling to get to his feet. He was kicked onto his back before he could make any real progress, and the blow landed hard enough to drive the air from his lungs. For a moment Faltora could only lay gasping, helpless as Koltira planted a foot in the center of his chest to keep him pinned.

“Oh, be a sport,” one of the humans called. “My new friends are getting hungry.”

Koltira paid the man no mind, instead staring down at Faltora with open contempt as he said, “There isn't anything you could do to save the old fool. What's one more body?”

Faltora gritted his teeth and tried to throw Koltira off, but the pain and weakness his broken bones caused him hindered his efforts. He would have had better luck freeing himself from beneath a stone pillar.

There was another wail from the old man, and Faltora twisted to watch as the elder scooted back along the ground, unable due to injury or weakness or terror to get back onto his feet. The absence of his walking stick was certainly no help to him; it had fallen between the old man and the death knight who stalked him, and the old man seemed in no hurry to grab for it.

“Please,” the elder whined. “Mercy!”

His hunter gave no indication that he had heard the plea; his face remained impassive, and his footsteps did not slow or falter as he closed the distance between them.

This death knight might once have been called old, himself; his hair and beard were a dull, pale gray, and even beneath the great, dark marks on his face, his features spoke to Faltora of old age—though the man had been human, and humans seemed to weather the passing of each season with far less grace than any elf.

The elder was still backing away, his breaths coming in ragged, fluttering gasps. Again Faltora struggled beneath Koltira, but he only succeeded in causing his brother to press down more firmly.

“Sit still, fool,” Koltira muttered.

The old man shrieked, and Faltora looked around again to see the gray-haired death knight set one booted foot in the middle of the elder’s lower leg. Faltora couldn't hear bones shattering, but from the way the old man cried out it wouldn't be long before they did.

“What should we do with this one?” the old man's attacker asked. His voice was so dry and unconcerned that the question nearly registered as a statement.

The younger human snorted and waved a hand dismissively. “He's worthless: a mewling coward with brittle bones and jerky for skin.” The man turned and grinned down at Faltora as he added, “I'll bet he makes a good first meal for these zombies. Give them a taste for elf flesh early on.”

Faltora’s vision went red; as he scrabbled blindly at Koltira's foot, he heard the old man begin to sob.

“Please,” the elder begged again.

Faltora’s nails frayed and broke in his struggles. He scarcely felt it; he needed to be up. He needed to be at the old man's side, he had to get up and _protect—_

Koltira stepped back.

With the pressure gone from his chest, Faltora leapt to his feet and managed to take all of two steps towards the elder before a fist caught him hard across the jaw, cracking the bone and shocking him from his rage. A blow to the back of his knee sent him down again, and then a hand tipped with broken nails closed in his _hair._

Arthas watched through Koltira's eyes as the elvish soldier shrieked and went mad with pain, just as his brother had the day before. This one took twice as long to calm down once Koltira shifted his grip, planting a foot in the crook of one knee and releasing the boy's hair in favor of gripping the top of his head. Either Faltora—as Koltira called him—was even less disciplined, or else his scalp was far more sensitive. Arthas wasn't sure which was more pathetic.

 _Maybe you should give your brother a scratch behind the ears,_ Arthas told Koltira. _You certainly seemed to enjoy it._

Koltira reacted with more fury, struggling against Arthas’ control like a bird caught in a cage and having about as much luck breaking free. Arthas snorted and turned his attention to the minds of his more loyal soldiers, keeping a firm hold on Koltira while he looked to see how many Stillriver elves were left.

Not many remained: A couple of women were separated from their children and brought down violently while what appeared to be the last surviving Stillriver soldier was forced to watch, bound and held on his knees in much the same fashion as Faltora.

The children were herded together: three of them in total, all alive and more or less unharmed as they wept and cringed away from the cultists guarding them. The soldier was told in no uncertain terms what awaited the innocents he had so thoroughly failed, and then his throat was cut.

His death removed the last possible scrap of resistance; now the Scourge could put this miserable little village behind them and continue their march on the high elven capital. Arthas scarcely needed to give the signal for his remaining handful of undead to move out; after the scene they had been allowed to witnessed, they were all of them riled up and eager to join their brethren in the carnage.

Down the slope they charged, necromancers and death knights on rotted steeds leading and herding the more mindless Scourge along in two thick ribbons that met and the river's edge, melded together at the ice bridge, and split into two again on the other side. Arthas was left alone atop the hill within a minute; the group he had brought numbered only a little over a couple hundred, and did not make up even a fraction of his army, despite Koltira's belief to the contrary. The rest of the Scourge were scattered farther into the elvish kingdom, attacking targets of much higher priority than this ruined little sanctuary.

The forces he sent now gave the action in the center of the sanctuary a wide berth; none of them needed the firm hand that Koltira still required to do as they were commanded.

Arthas didn't even feel the need to check in with Thassarian at the moment. The man was surrounded by loyal Scourge soldiers and minions; regardless of his fit of idiocy the day before, Thassarian wasn't so stupid as to act out in front of so many of his fellow death knights—particularly Orbaz, who radiated such savagery that Arthas could sense it even without entering the man's mind. 

Thassarian felt Arthas’ attention pass over him briefly, but the Scourge champion did not linger. It seemed Thassarian was more or less forgiven for his earlier rebellion.

The elf beneath him was a withered, pathetic creature, so unlike the quel’dorei warriors _(so unlike Koltira was and had been)_ that it was easy to pretend his prey wasn't an elf at all. Thassarian opened himself to the gnawing bloodthirst his runeblade evoked in him, becoming first numb and then unspeakably revolted by the cowering creature he kept trapped under his foot.

He was aware of Koltira hauling Faltora about behind the line of zombies, but only dimly so. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the undead themselves part to give the brothers a clear view of the murder he would commit; a slow breath later, and he noted the rest of the small army Arthas had brought were now charging down and around Stillriver Sanctuary on both sides. Thassarian saw these things, but cared little about them; his vision was black around the edges, and the stench of the living thing beneath him was a siren song for violence.

The old creature opened his mouth again, a wail already bubbling past his lips, and Thassarian raised his greatsword and brought it plunging down into the mortal’s leg, cracking into the femur as his victim shrieked and flailed about, pinned and bleeding and already paler than before. There was a laugh from Orbaz and a furious howl from Faltora. Thassarian ignored them both.

The runeblades forged for the death knights were more than vampiric in nature. When wielded properly, they acted as amplifiers and conductors for the magic Arthas’ elite soldiers wielded, offering them greater range and accuracy and making them even greater monsters in the field than they already were. So long as the blade was able to feed on suffering and life, it would assist and obey the death knight wielding it.

Thassarian waited until his weeping prey began to fall quiet—until the greatsword began to hum rather than sing as it began to be sated—and then sent magic crackling down the length of the blade, black and reeking of decay. It chewed its way down into the old man, blackening his flesh and boiling his blood as he began to thrash in earnest, his screams shrill and broken as though he was being electrocuted.

It was over shortly. The magic took less than thirty seconds to travel along the arteries and major vessels of the mortal, destroying any tissues it encountered, burning and melting the flesh away from the inside until it reached his heart and liquefied it.

The old man gave a final jerk and coughed up a mouthful of thick, discolored blood. His eyes locked unseeing upon Thassarian as the arcane glow faded from them; when he fell back against the ground, his eyes were open still, wide and empty in his contorted face.

Thassarian ripped his blade free of the carcass, his mind and vision clearing again as the runeblade fell quiet at last, sated for the moment on the suffering it had inflicted, the life it had drunk. The elf beneath him looked half-rotted, his skin papery and transparent, blotched with black bruises where his blood had spouted from ruptured vessels and been trapped beneath unbroken flesh. Swift or not, it must have been a horrendous way to die.

Orbaz gave some signal to his new undead pets, and Thassarian stepped back as they fell upon the old man, shoving each other about in a blind frenzy and reaching with hands and teeth to tear away chunks of flesh. The mindless ones were always hungry, always seeking to fill the yawning void left by their stolen souls. Thassarian battled with that same emptiness, but not nearly to the level that tormented the ghouls and lesser undead. Being allowed to retain consciousness of any sort tamped down the instinct to devour with the knowledge that there could be no replacement for what was lost.

He envied the ignorance of the mindless ones. It would be easier to be simply ravenous.

_“You.”_

Thassarian looked up to see Faltora, still held down on his knees, staring up at him as though Thassarian had just slapped him hard across the face.

Thassarian knew Koltira's brother; they had encountered once before, in much the same manner that Thassarian had first run across Koltira. Clearly, Faltora remembered Thassarian, too.

Faltora didn't look away from Thassarian, but his next words were directed to Koltira: “Is _this_ why you were taken, brother? Did you _let_ them twist you so that you could be with your pet _human?”_

Thassarian ignored the barb; far more cutting was the implication that Koltira, of all people, could be swayed so completely by something as trivial as _heartache_ when he had the lives of his people to protect. Faltora should _know_ better than that, dammit, he knew Koltira even better than Thassarian did.

Arthas laughed at the back of Thassarian's mind, and Thassarian's patience—already thin and terribly strained—snapped once again.

“Don't be an ass,” Thassarian growled, swinging his blade about and planting it in the chalky soil beside him. “He was captured while attempting to defend civilians, and tortured until his body was broken. He died fighting, and he fought us still when he was resurrected. You piss on the fate of a loyal soldier.”

Faltora flinched back, visibly stunned at the outburst. Even Koltira, controlled though he still had to be, rocked back onto his heels and blinked as though he was fighting to hide his own shock.

And then Thassarian knew agony.

Arthas snarled and forced himself into Thassarian's mind, immobilizing the fool and flooding him with enough magic to cause the death knight's mind to run blank with suffering.

 _I told you I would do worse than before if you stepped out of line again,_ Arthas snapped. _Did you think the warning was an empty one?_

Thassarian only vaguely seemed to understand him. It didn't matter; he would _see_ the fruit of his rebellion soon enough.

Koltira struggled against Arthas again, fighting more ferociously than ever as he sensed the champion's attention shift for the moment. Arthas quashed the elf easily, slamming against his will until it shattered and might have left Koltira trembling, if his body were still his own.

 _I've had quite enough of your defiance, Koltira,_ Arthas growled. _How many times must we break you before you fall in line?_

Koltira's thoughts become a blur of invective, and Arthas rewarded him with a taste of the same agony Thassarian endured.

Still holding Thassarian and Koltira in check, Arthas turned his attention next to Orbaz. The man's mind was a dark and bristling thing now, and Arthas’ face twisted into a savage grin as he realized there was more than simple bloodlust to be found there.

Orbaz had been a dangerous man in life, swift to anger and only inclined to control himself at all when the situation demanded it. Now, with his mind an open book before Arthas, the Scourge champion could see just how deep the darkness ran. Orbaz didn't revel in violence for violence’s sake alone; carnage was an aphrodisiac for him.

 _Orbaz._ Arthas scarcely needed to address the man; slavering as he was, Orbaz was alert the instant Arthas’ attention fell upon him, eager as a hound awaiting the order to kill.

 _He's made us sound weak,_ Orbaz snarled. _What kind of idiot gives hope to the enemy?_

 _One who's about to regret doing so,_ Arthas replied.

Orbaz’ response was an immediate surge of violent imagery and more raw arousal at the thought of breaking those who defied the Scourge in any capacity. But none of the images directly involved _Thassarian_ —only a desire to take what _belonged_ to Thassarian and destroy it for the sake of a hatred that had nothing at all to do with the man's present defiance.

Arthas couldn't care less what Orbaz’ exact motivation may be; it was enough that it would help the man to serve his prince without question.

The Champion of the Scourge was not restricted to speaking to only one mind at a time; such shortcomings were the burden of lesser servants of the Lich King. Arthas opened his link with Orbaz the way one might open a book, and allowed Thassarian and Koltira to listen as well as they could through their suffering to the rest of his conversation with their more loyal brother-in-arms.

 _You have served me admirably, Orbaz,_ he said, and even in his ire he couldn't help letting a small scrap of something resembling affection bleed into his tone, particularly when Orbaz responded with an unabashed swell of pride. _Here, and in every battle before this. As a reward, I give to you the task of reminding your fellow death knights of the price of disloyalty._

Forgotten and unaware of the discourse unfolding around him, Faltora began to struggle again, drawing Arthas back to Koltira long enough to cuff the mortal across the head. The blow sent Faltora onto his belly in the dirt; he was given no time to recover before Koltira was made to put a boot in the middle of his back, pinning him firmly to the ground before Arthas returned his attention to Orbaz.

The human watched the short scuffle silently, but not patiently; his mind had become a torrent of dark, vivid images, each one clearer and more depraved than the last and all of them involving the brothers specifically. Even when he brought himself to attention again under Arthas’ scrutiny, the images and the lust they stirred in Orbaz remained very present.

Arthas found himself grinning again in spite of his foul temper as he took a moment to read the debauchery Orbaz itched to unleash. The man would need far less cajoling or instruction in this than Arthas might have anticipated; his tastes already ran directly parallel to the punishment the Scourge champion had in mind.

 _Koltira is young and has yet to accept his place among us,_ Arthas said. _And Thassarian will continue to rebel as long as his pet elf remains savage. Since you so enjoyed yourself with the she-elf, Orbaz—_ and Orbaz’ mind swam again with lust for a moment, _—I thought you might appreciate the chance to reprimand your newest comrade._

Immediately, there was a rush of fury from Koltira, and just as powerful was the surge of dread from Thassarian. Linked as their minds were by Arthas’ magic, the reactions of both of the wayward knights were left bare for Orbaz to sense—just as Orbaz’ glee at their horror was left bare to them.

 _What would you have me do, My Lord?_ Orbaz asked.

Arthas did not respond immediately. Transferring even a fraction of his power to another—even for such a short amount of time—was new enough still that it took more concentration than merely communicating with his forces. Still, Orbaz was a receptive vessel with an affinity for magic that had been sadly overlooked in life. It took only a moment to give the man the magic necessary for his task.

The tension that built up in the meantime certainly made up for the time it took to finish the transfer.

 _I give you temporary control over Koltira,_ Arthas said, and as he spoke he let his knowledge of the exact spell Orbaz must perform bleed into the death knight's mind. _Use it to remind him of his place; it's clear he won't learn without repetition._

Koltira's mind went blank with understanding, and the sudden silence was like the drawing of breath before a great wail. Thassarian reached the same realization a moment later, and his memories and the rage and despair they brought with them came slamming forward with enough force to rock the other three minds to which Thassarian was connected.

 _The mortal Koltira currently restrains is named Faltora,_ Arthas informed Orbaz, after another moment had passed and the man still had not put together quite what Arthas was driving at. _He is Koltira's brother. Don't you think it would be fitting if Faltora were to die by his brother's hand… and in the same manner as his brother?_

Now Orbaz understood—and as Koltira and Thassarian raged against their minds, Orbaz threw his head back and laughed aloud, startling all but Arthas. Faltora, in particular, looked at the man as though he was mad… and then twisted his head as well as he was able to scowl vaguely in Arthas’ direction.

Clearly Faltora was the wiser sibling. What a pity that he must be destroyed.

 _That will just **crush** poor Thassarian,_ Orbaz sneered. _His pet elf, destroying his own littermate just as Thassarian destroyed **him?**_

Koltira howled across the link between their minds, and somewhere underneath that howling Thassarian's mind scattered in all directions—this piece cursing Arthas, another promising all manner of vengeance against Orbaz, another still turning against Thassarian himself in a blind rage.

Poor Thassarian, indeed. Arthas laughed again and left the fool to stew in his own softness.

 _Show them no mercy, Orbaz,_ Arthas said. _I will keep Thassarian on his leash. You… enjoy yourself._

With that, he let the mental links dissolve, leaving each man to the solitude of his own mind again and sighing at the quiet that rushed to fill the void. Tormenting would-be traitors was always fun, but Thassarian and Koltira were so _loud_ about the ordeal…

In the next instant he released his hold on Koltira and snorted as the elf jerked free like a wild stallion yanking at its lead. Orbaz would need to take control on his own; Arthas wouldn't give him _everything_ on a silver platter. Not when he had already proven himself more than capable enough.

Orbaz grinned as Koltira twitched, then moved as though to lunge towards him, completely disregarding the living elf who knelt beside him. The mortal would never get through the zombies gathered nearby, and Orbaz could have taken Koltira even without the Prince's most generous gift.

Still… the gift had been given. It would be rude not to make proper use of it.

Sending out his will to ensnare Koltira felt just that way—like casting a net across the back of a rabid dog to drag it down for the shooting. Orbaz had shot several rabid dogs in his time, and the elf fought just as savagely as any one of those dogs, though the struggle now was in the mind. Physically, the elf did little more than stagger to a halt as the ownership of his body was stolen from him once again.

 _Let. Me. Go,_ Koltira snarled. Hatred seethed in his mind, and Orbaz let it wash across him like cool water.

 _You heard our master,_ Orbaz told him, emphasizing _master_ just enough for the elf to spit wordlessly at him across their link. _I'm supposed to be breaking you in, little elf. Unlike you, I know how to follow orders._

It was ridiculously easy to control Koltira with the spell in place; all Orbaz had to do was think of what he wanted from the elf, and the elf responded, straightening out of his half-coiled slouch and standing now in a manner identical to Orbaz’ stance and posture. If it weren't for the slight delay in the elf’s responses, it would almost feel like Orbaz was flexing his own hand.

Orbaz grinned and turned his attention to Faltora for the moment. He had taken advantage of his brother's lapse in attention to free himself, and was now crawling as quietly as he was able towards the broken end of an elvish blade.

Odd that the mortal didn't just drag himself to his feet. Orbaz took a closer look and realized one foot lay limp behind the elf. It must have been rather thoroughly shattered in the altercation before.

“Koltira, collect that mortal before he drags himself to the water,” Orbaz ordered. “We don't want the mongrel drowning himself.”

Of course, Koltira had no choice but to obey, no matter how much his mind raged against Orbaz. Even the elf’s movement was changed now; he stalked towards his prey with the measured step of a regimented soldier, rather than with that slithering, creeping, ghostlike float the elves had.

It was like watching a hard-broken horse fall into a proper gait. Orbaz let his teeth come together and swallowed back the sudden moisture in his mouth as he watched Koltira bear down on the living elf.

He was caught. Rather than freeze and await whatever new torment the death knights had planned for him, Faltora began to crawl faster, gritting his teeth against the searing pain in his arms. A broken blade would gouge him as much as it did Koltira, but it was the last weapon he had before he was left with his teeth and what remained of his nails, and he would use it, dammit, he would use the stones and sullied waters of Quel'Thalas herself if he was given half the chance, and make a last stand that might once have made his brother proud.

A booted foot came down across his ankle, and Faltora’s vision went white as bones shattered beneath the impact. He was sure he screamed, though he couldn't hear it. Everything seemed to have gone silent, or perhaps there was too much noise entirely to process.

The blade. It was just in front of him, just in reach, and he stretched out his hand for it even as he was dragged back by his ankle. If he could just get hold of that blade…

“Stubborn wretch.”

The pressure was gone from his ankle, and now a hand closed down tight around his arm and yanked him upright so hard his shoulder popped. The pain of that paled in comparison to the agony that chewed its way up his leg as he was made to stand upright, then dragged around to face Koltira.

The thing his brother had become stared back at him, coldly impatient as Faltora shuddered and fought to keep his feet in spite of the pain. There was no pity in the burning blue eyes that stared him down; if he fell, he would be made to pay for it.

“Hold him in place.”

Faltora looked over Koltira's shoulder and snarled as the dark-haired human approached. The blood of the Stillriver elves still dripped from the man's armor and hands, and there was a thick spray of crimson across his face, turning his leering, bony features into a hideous mask.

Koltira twisted about, easily pinning Faltora’s arms behind his back in the time it took for the living elf to recover and attempt to struggle again. Before—when both brothers had been living, when there had needed to be no distinction between who drew breath and who did not—there had been ways to break Koltira's grip during their scuffles, tricks that could almost always throw the elder off balance enough to allow Faltora to escape. Faltora was too badly injured to pull any of the same tricks now, and the thing that had once been Koltira wasn't allowing him the chance to try. His first hard twist against his captor earned Faltora a hard strike across the back of the head that stunned him just long enough for the human death knight to reach them.

The human was even uglier up close. Now Faltora could see dark blotches in the patches of skin on the man's cheeks and forehead that weren't painted with gore; his eyes were heavy-lidded and surrounded by enough ruptured vessels to appear bruised, and beneath the seething, icy glow emanating from them, Faltora was able to make out more of the same speckling in the whites of the death knight's eyes.

“You look mad enough to spit, elf,” the human sneered. Elvish blood dripped down his lips as he spoke. “Go ahead and try it, if you're of a mind. You won't be needing all those teeth, anyway.”

Faltora snarled and felt his ears pin back. “You don't frighten me, death knight,” he snapped.

“Not yet,” the human said. He drew a knife and slipped the blade into the gap between Faltora’s pauldron and breastplate, easily slicing through the leather straps holding the pauldron in place before grabbing it off Faltora’s shoulder. It banged hard against the battered joint as it went, sending dull pain blossoming through the muscle and bone.

The death knight made a show of tossing the pauldron aside, and Faltora snarled and swung his feet up to kick at the pig, bracing himself for the impact against his injured foot and ankle as Koltira stumbled under the sudden shift in Faltora’s weight.

The human death knight stepped to the side, completely avoiding the blow Faltora aimed for him. In nearly the same motion the man hooked his arm around Faltora’s left leg, brought the other hand to rest atop the knee, and twisted the limb inward and down.

The world went white around Faltora. White and cacophonously silent, and pain beyond description swept through him until in the ensuing delirium he became convinced there would be nothing left when it passed.

Ice stabbed at his mind, shredding the whiteness and dragging him back into total, horrid clarity. The pain was not gone, only faded into a jagged, pulsing ache that made his eyes water with each peak. His body still trembled with shock; adrenalin still chilled and numbed all but the greatest points of agony.

…Magic. They must be using magic—so much of it that he was certain he could taste it, a bitter musk that coated his tongue like slime and drowned even the bile that rose in the back of his throat as he realized they meant to keep him awake through his suffering.

“Wake up, little elf,” a voice sneered. “It's not nap time.”

Faltora opened his eyes with some effort, features twisted in pain. He meant to scowl at the patronizing bastard in front of him, but his head hung low, and lifting it felt an insurmountable task. Instead Faltora’s gaze fell downward along the length of his body.

He was still being held upright, and the human death knight was still stripping him of his armor, piece by piece. The process was too drawn out to be methodical; as the pig moved to strip away his cuirass, he brushed his fingers almost tenderly across the lacquered surface of the breastplate before reaching around and letting his hands rest on Faltora’s sides. Here the human lingered another instant, and even reeling as Faltora still was he could have sworn he heard the death knight take a long, rattling breath through his nose as his gaze roved shamelessly across Faltora.

Faltora’s stomach twisted. His disgust must have shown on his face, because the human grinned at him and said, “What's the matter, knife-ear? I thought your kind liked being touched.”

Faltora jerked against Koltira's hold, baring his teeth and hissing furiously at the human death knight. The pig didn't even flinch. He only chuckled and sent gouts of foul magic through his hands, rotting away the sides of Faltora’s cuirass until it fell away in pieces.

The human didn't stop there. His spell continued to eat through Faltora’s gambeson, sending sickly, green-black flames crawling up his sides and across the tops of his shoulders. Faltora shuddered and gritted his teeth, but the flames only shredded the padded garment until it had been reduced to a scattering of linen and wool on the ground. His flesh was left unharmed when the spell finally dissipated.

“There,” the human said, “that wasn't so bad, was it?”

Faltora expected the torture to start then, and braced himself for agony as the death knight raised his hands. Even when the man began loosening the straps of his gauntlets, Faltora remained tense and increasingly nauseous. He had seen what was done to Nithiriel and the others. He had seen this one among the death knights who carried out the brutal executions. It would not surprise him if this creature was uncovering his hands so that he might better enjoy whatever gruesome work he had in store.

Faltora did not pray for whatever was coming to be swift so much as he did for his body to fail him early on. If he longed to die, willed himself to die, surely, surely he would have to suffer only a little. He didn't trust himself not to scream. He didn't want to give this pig the satisfaction of hearing it. Undeath most certainly awaited him, but if he could at least deprive this one of his entertainment—

Cold hands slid along his sides, and far from cruel or calculating, the touch of them felt intimate. These were not searching strokes. They were long and slow and firm, caresses tipped with the barest edge of short nails scraping along his flesh until it quivered.

Faltora’s eyes snapped up to meet the human's. There was malice etched in every line of the other man's face, but his eyes were heavy-lidded now, and beneath the seething gleam of necromantic magic his pupils were blown wide.

“What are you doing?” Faltora hissed.

The human grinned again and stepped closer, nearly bringing himself flush with Faltora as he slid one hand around and up to thumb the elf’s nipple.

“Having fun,” the death knight answered. “You think just because we're dead, we don't have needs?”

This time Faltora threw himself back, trying to knock Koltira off balance.

Koltira held steady, as solid and unflinching as stone, and the human death knight laughed as Faltora continued to struggle fruitlessly against his captor.

“Oh, please,” the human sneered. “You're not fooling anyone. You elves are all whores; don't pretend you're turned off by a little cold flesh.”

“Koltira,” Faltora said, craning his head around as best he could to try to lock eyes with the older elf. “Brother—you can't let him do this!”

A hand slid along the length of his throat, its thumb pressing down against his jugular until his vision began to black out in one eye and his body grew weak. Faltora thrashed feebly, but the pressure remained for only another instant before the hand was removed and blood was once again allowed to rush unimpeded through the artery.

“He's not going to help you, fool,” the human sneered as Faltora slumped against Koltira. “He died dripping enough spunk to knock up half your kingdom. The whole camp heard him wailing for Thassarian.”

“You lie,” Faltora hissed. His tongue was heavy and tasted of iron as his body continued to recover from the brief gap in its blood supply.

“He's not arguing, is he?” The human flashed Koltira a glance over Faltora’s shoulder and mockingly added, “Surely, if I was lying, he would have spoken up by now, proud warrior that he is.”

Faltora thrashed again, this time attempting to slam Koltira's head with his own. Instead, Koltira stepped back and twisted them about just enough that the intended blow missed; without anything stopping it, Faltora’s head continued back too far and at the wrong angle, and pain flared in his neck as something strained as a result.

“You'll fall apart at this rate,” Koltira said, finally breaking his silence in a low, thoughtful tone of voice. “If you break much more of yourself, what will be left for us?”

Ice shot through Faltora’s gut, but before he could respond a much more physical chill found its way to the injured side of his neck, shocking him in spite of the gentleness with which it appeared.

“Koltira…?” No. No, no, no, Light, no, not this—

“We're dead anyway,” Koltira breathed against the side of his neck. “Soon, you will be, too. What does it matter how we act, now?”

The other death knight slid his hands down Faltora’s sides, but the icy touch barely registered with him as Koltira kissed the skin just below his ear. Only the sound and feel of his lower armor being stripped away was enough to pull Faltora’s attention back to the human with a desperate snarl.

Magic washed around Faltora’s arms like an icy sludge, replacing Koltira's iron grip and freezing solid before Faltora could try to free himself again. He tried anyway, but his lunge forward was halted as Koltira wrapped his arms around him and brought him firmly back.

“Stay.” The word ghosted across Faltora’s neck, and another kiss followed it.

The stench of disintegrating metal and leather reached Faltora, distracting him again until Koltira's cold lips pulled back, bringing sharp teeth flush with Faltora’s skin in a series of sharp nips. The mortal elf shuddered and grimaced, but restrained as he was there was nothing he could do to fight this thing that wore his brother's face.

“Light…” Faltora whispered.

Having now reduced the elf to his leggings and a few last pieces of armor, Orbaz grinned and ran his hand downward along Faltora’s stomach, pressing callused fingers firmly against the muscled expanse to knead the elf’s warm flesh. When Faltora shuddered at that, Orbaz chuckled and slid his hand further down, following the gradually thickening trail of soft, blond hair that began just above the navel and vanished beneath the waistband of his leggings.

“There _is_ no Light, here,” he said. “It’s already abandoned you. It doesn't care what happens to this kingdom of strays.” He leaned in and dragged his teeth along Faltora’s jawline, hard enough to redden the skin with one pass. “It certainly doesn't care about you.”

Faltora trembled, and a hiss escaped through his teeth as Koltira leaned down to mouth at his shoulder.

Orbaz let his hands travel lower still, down into Faltora’s leggings and around to cup the elf’s hard-muscled ass. Faltora sucked a hard breath in through his teeth and gave a full-body jerk as Orbaz dug his fingers in and then spread his cheeks.

“Is this familiar?” Orbaz asked. “How sloppy a hole should I expect?”

Faltora swore at him through clenched teeth, spitting out a barely coherent jumble of Thalassian and Common. Orbaz didn't speak a word of the elves’ sing-song drivel, but the insults that were spoken in Common were accurate enough. Credit where it was due.

Disgust washed through Orbaz, but it wasn't his own. Orbaz grinned at Koltira again as the fool let loose with his own slew of unspoken curses and thrashed again within the confines of his mind.

 _You're even closer to the mark,_ Orbaz commented. He leaned in and dragged his tongue slowly along Faltora’s collarbone, stopping near the shoulder to suck at his flesh until the mortal trembled beneath him.

 _You're even worse than Arthas,_ Koltira spat. _No wonder you're his favorite **pet.**_

Orbaz chuckled as Faltora squirmed uselessly between them. _Is that supposed to hurt my feelings? I'm not the one being punished for insubordination, here, little elf._

He gave Faltora’s ass another squeeze, then let go and stepped back until he was no longer in contact with the mortal. He trailed his fingers along the other man’s flesh as he went, though, and was rewarded with a shaking hiss and a tremble that looked rather fetching on Faltora.

Orbaz drew his knife again and flipped it in his hand. Light danced across the blade, catching Faltora’s attention for a moment before Koltira stole it away again with a loud suck at his brother's neck. Even so, the mortal elf went white, and another hard shake passed through his body as Orbaz closed with him again and began to cut away his pants.

 _This is all the reason I need to follow orders,_ Orbaz said. _Why incur our lord's wrath when obeying him nets me such wonderful rewards?_

Koltira's mind flared with rage again, predictable and satisfying. It made for a perfect contrast with Faltora’s increasingly shallow breaths and the bone-deep shaking as Orbaz continued downwards, following the outside seam of the elf’s left leg and digging the blade in just enough to draw a bright red line in the skin it traveled across.

“Relax, little elf,” Orbaz said. “I'm not going to dismember you. Yet,” he added, looking up and grinning as he watched Faltora go even paler. “You won't be as much fun to fuck once you stop breathing.”

Faltora’s knee shot forward as Orbaz knelt down to reach the lower leg, connecting with his chin hard enough to slam his teeth together. The brief discomfort annoyed Orbaz more than anything else—but that was reason enough for this uppity little knife-ear to be put back in his proper place. Clearly being difficult to break was a trait that ran in the whole filthy pedigree.

Well. Orbaz had broken tougher beasts than these two.

He wrapped one hand around the back of the elf’s knee, keeping his leg pinned forward and cutting away the poleyn protecting the joint as Faltora struggled. The rest of the fabric covering the leg soon followed, leaving it naked in his grasp.

“You should be more careful, little elf,” Orbaz murmured, pressing his lips to the other man's knee in a quick, gentle kiss. “You might hurt yourself again if you keep this up.”

“To hell with you,” Faltora spat, and he gave a hard twist with his hips—to no avail. All he succeeded in doing was twisting his own leg; Orbaz felt the muscles there strain and wondered how badly the fool had just injured himself.

“Depending on who you ask, I'm already there.” Orbaz smiled and bit at Faltora’s thigh, chewing at it until a handful of red marks overlapped each other above the knee. Many of the marks continued to deepen to red-violet, but none of them bled. Orbaz had been careful to gauge the pressure he exerted; he didn't want to take chunks out of the mortal just yet.

Faltora tried to jerk away again. Orbaz reached up and around with his other hand and buried his knife in the front of the elf’s thigh, angling the blade up towards the hip.

Faltora screamed and thrashed, but his leg began to fall limp in Orbaz’ grip, its muscles quivering feverishly to make up for the one that had just been torn. A quick twist of the knife dragged another cry from the elf and increased the size of the injury to that muscle, and the quivering stopped as the pain of attempting to flex that leg became too much for the mortal.

“I warned you,” Orbaz chided. He ripped the knife loose, and a short burst of magic forced the blood that came streaming from the wound to clot and dry before too much could be lost. “You should start listening to me. I'm not the type to repeat myself.”

The elf behaved himself after that, trembling and cursing Orbaz through his teeth but otherwise holding still as the other poleyn and rest of his leggings were cut away. Orbaz stood again when it was done and hooked his free hand into the waistband of the elf’s braies, letting it rest there while he brought the knife up and studied the scarlet smears across its blade.

“This is the only part I miss,” Orbaz commented. “The dead don't tend to bleed much. And the ones that do have much darker, thicker stuff in their veins.” He raised his eyes to meet Faltora’s and gave the blade a good, long lick. Copper and salt washed across his tongue, warming it and sending heat flaring down through his gut and into his groin.

“You mortals are the only ones who taste good,” he purred.

Faltora bared his teeth, but said nothing. No matter; he'd be screaming plenty again in a few moments.

Orbaz flipped the knife about in his hand and cut the waistband of the elf’s braies, then sheathed the blade and ripped the shredded garment away. The process wasn't a smooth one; the braies came off only after tugging hard at Faltora’s hips, and from the strangled snarl he let out the jostle was a painful one.

“I want him down on the ground,” Orbaz said, turning his attention again to Koltira. “On his knees, where he belongs.”

Koltira spat and swore at him across their link, but Orbaz’ control of his body remained absolute. Koltira moved quickly and spared his brother no gentleness as he shoved the mortal forward and down onto his knees, dragging a sharp cry from Faltora on impact. With his hands still bound behind his back, Faltora was forced to lay with his face and chest flush to the ground; his battered legs were curled awkwardly beneath him, raising his backside like an offering.

Not a bad look. Not at all.

The idea of forcing Faltora to lick his boots was a tempting one, but Orbaz was already riled and impatient. He had the taste of the elf’s blood still on his tongue, and now the man was helpless and naked before him.

Arousal pumped hot through Orbaz’ veins as he paced in a slow circle around Faltora. He wanted to take this knife-ear and make him scream until his throat bled, but he needed to prepare, first—pieces of his own armor needed removing, for starters, and then there was the nasty little detail of lubrication to be dealt with. It was lucky that this was meant to be a punishment for Koltira; _someone_ would need to keep Faltora occupied while Orbaz was busy.

 _Don't you dare—_ Koltira started.

“He looks uncomfortable, Koltira,” Orbaz said. “Help him settle in, will you? It won't be any fun if I snap him in half the second I mount him.”

 _I will **eviscerate** you,_ Koltira hissed.

 _Don't you have a sibling to see to?_ Orbaz gave the elf a hard mental shove and turned his attention to unfastening his pauldrons. He wanted to feel Faltora squirm against him when he took him, and the heavy plate armor he wore would hinder that.

Koltira dragged against himself with everything he had, but Orbaz’ control of him was just as unbreakable as Arthas’ had been. He could do nothing to stop himself from kneeling down behind Faltora and cupping his backside in his hands, no matter how furiously he tried.

Faltora trembled at his touch.

“Brother,” he said weakly.

Koltira paused. He had just enough control to stop for a moment—or perhaps Orbaz was reigning him back, waiting to listen through Koltira's ears to what Faltora had to say.

Faltora seemed to take the hesitation as a sign that he was getting through. His voice became stronger as he twisted about to look back at Koltira and said, “Koltira, please. You can't do this.”

Orbaz laughed aloud again.

“I can, and I will,” Koltira answered. He spread Faltora with his thumbs and breathed out against his skin, drawing a flinch from his brother.

“You can fight them, Koltira.” Faltora was growing more desperate. He was louder now, more urgent. More anguished. “This isn't you. I know this isn't you. They're making you do this, and you don't have to let them—”

Koltira leaned forward and ran his tongue along the flesh between Faltora’s sack and anus, and the younger elf let out a sharp, startled cry in response.

“Be quiet, Faltora.” Koltira spoke for himself, this time, and it showed in the roughness of his voice. “Your pleas will change nothing.”

Faltora thrashed about, trying to drag himself away in spite of his bound arms and crippled legs. Koltira dug his nails into the mortal’s flesh until blood dribbled down his thighs, but that only made Faltora fight even harder.

 _“Fight them,_ damn it!” Faltora spat. Then he cried out as Koltira dragged one set of nails down his leg, leaving deep, bloody lines in his flesh. _“Please!”_

“Enough,” Koltira growled.

His tongue smoothed flat along Faltora’s anus, then curled to prod at the opening until it flared for an instant with the stimulus. A long, hard shudder rolled through Faltora, and a soft whimper escaped the younger elf as Koltira brought one hand around to stroke him off.

“Stop,” Faltora whined. “Stop, Koltira. Please…”

“Sweet hell, do you ever shut up?” Orbaz stalked towards them, naked from the waist up and missing his fauld and codpiece. The human pig was already hard, and grinned as Faltora gasped and flinched away from him.

The move brought him flush with Koltira.

“Stay back,” the mortal spat through his teeth. He was shaking again, no longer seeming to register Koltira's ongoing ministrations as Orbaz chuckled and took another deliberate step forward.

“Or you'll do what?” Orbaz asked. “Stand up and draw a blade on me? I'm terrified, really.”

“Get away!” Faltora snapped, speaking this time in Thalassian as panic began to bleed into his tone. Again he cringed back against Koltira, cowering towards an old source of comfort that no longer existed.

Koltira blinked—half in shock—at the sudden sting of tears in his eyes. He hadn't thought the dead were capable of weeping.

“You'll have to repeat that,” Orbaz said, stopping over Faltora and running a hand along his cock almost idly. “In Common, elf, not that lilting garbage you elves call a language.”

Faltora cursed him in Thalassian again, and Koltira let his eyes fall closed as the stench of his brother's fear began to choke the air.

 _Will you just get on with it?_ he hissed at Orbaz.

 _What's wrong, Koltira?_ Orbaz asked. _Don't have a stomach for begging, yet? Give it time; you'll learn to love it._

The elf snarled at him across their link, but now his rage only served to fuel the steady surge of lust already coursing through Orbaz’ dried out veins. He could stand here and pump himself to completion just watching his little elves fuck each other—but that would not be nearly as much fun.

“That will do,” he said, waving Koltira off. “Come around to the front, and see if you can't shut him up.”

Koltira was eager enough to back away from Faltora, but needed Orbaz to give him another psychic shove to comply with the rest of his orders.

Faltora flinched as Koltira knelt beside his head; his sides heaved now with the quick, gasping breaths of a cornered mouse.

“Don't look so scared, little elf.” Orbaz stalked around behind Faltora and knelt down, fiddling with a small glass vial as he went. “I'll make it good for you, if you behave.”

Faltora snarled another long line in Thalassian. Orbaz rolled his eyes as he uncorked the vial; why did these blasted elves have to be so singularly _stubborn?_

“Fine, then. Keep making an ass of yourself.” Orbaz paused, then grinned again and added, “Not that you have to work very hard at it, now.”

The vial was small and too narrow to dip a finger into, so Orbaz poured the olive oil inside directly onto Faltora’s hole, working it down inside the elf with two fingers. The mortal was tight, and gasped and squirmed in clear discomfort as Orbaz worked his way inside. Koltira had been too gentle with him.

Good.

Orbaz gave Faltora another few twists with his fingers before withdrawing his hand and wiping the remnants of the oil along his cock. The mortal trembled as Orbaz gripped his hips, and twisted his head around to try to watch the human over his shoulder.

Orbaz met his eyes and grinned as he slammed his hips forward, burying himself up to the hilt in one thrust and dragging a scream from Faltora that echoed loudly through the deserted sanctuary.

Fury lit up Koltira's end of the mental link—fury and a slew of curses that Orbaz had already heard a dozen times before.

“What's wrong, Koltira? You look as though you feel left out.” Orbaz grinned savagely. “You've got a hole on your end to stuff, too. Don't let me have all the fun.”

Faltora trembled and shrank away from Koltira.

 _Laugh while you can, Orbaz,_ Koltira spat. _You can't control me forever._

 _You elves all sound the same,_ Orbaz lamented. _Can't any of you come up with more than the same handful of insults?_

Koltira moved. His hands stroked Faltora’s ears, gentle and slow, until the younger elf’s face twisted into an expression of anguished stimulation. Perhaps if he could offer Faltora some measure of relief—

Arthas’ presence settled over him like a leaden weight.

 _Having a little trouble, Koltira?_ the fallen prince asked. _Here; allow me to motivate you._

Magic ghosted against his mind—and then there came pressure and warmth, or the facsimile of warmth, and a hiss escaped Koltira in spite of Orbaz’ unwavering control over him. Koltira's thoughts blurred; his body grew loose and simmered with sudden energy as his codpiece quickly became too snug.

 _Damn you!_ Koltira snarled. Arthas only laughed and retreated again from his mind—but the wretched spell he had cast remained in full effect.

Orbaz was not oblivious to the change; Koltira could feel his delight across their link, dark and vicious and oozing like slime coating the inside of his skull.

“He seems a little thirsty, doesn't he?” the human said, pausing in his thrusting to run a deceptively gentle hand along the length of Faltora’s spine. “Koltira, why don't you give him something to drink?”

He could not disobey. Koltira watched his own hands remove his codpiece, watched them free his stiffened cock from trousers and braies and line it up with his brother's gaping, gasping mouth, and could do nothing to stop them no matter how hard he fought, how violently he scrabbled at the walls of his mind.

Faltora clenched his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut as Orbaz leaned forward and ran a hand slowly along his side. With the hand that did not stabilize his cock, Koltira reached out and threaded his fingers through Faltora’s hair, skimming the younger elf’s scalp until his eyes rolled back and a choked whimper escaped him.

“Open up,” Koltira heard himself say, and his voice was soft and hoarse with arousal he did not want to feel.

A muscle bulged along Faltora’s jaw as he gritted his teeth. A stubborn set came over his features, hardening them even as Orbaz’ continued ministrations drew a feeble shudder from him.

Koltira's hand curled, dragging still-broken nails lightly along the top of Faltora’s head. Faltora gave a louder, thinner cry at this and shook as though he'd been electrocuted—and before he could control himself again, Koltira thrust forward, sheathing himself down his brother's throat.

Faltora gagged and fought to pull himself back, but Orbaz was still there, blocking his escape and laughing at the mortal's struggles. Koltira was no help, either; his hand slid forward and came to rest at the back of Faltora’s head, keeping him pinned flush against Koltira's abdomen as Orbaz resumed ramming into him from behind. Koltira held him only until his face began to flush—and then he, too, began thrusting. His movements were entirely out of synch with Orbaz’, and Koltira was certain that was being done on purpose.

Faltora’s struggles became more frantic now, the thrashing of his body more erratic as he fought to free himself. The muscles throughout his arms and back rippled with his efforts, and when he could manage it his gagged whines and moans hummed through Koltira in a way that heightened the pleasure until he felt ready to vomit.

A hand reached forward and gripped the back of Koltira's head. Orbaz did not let him resist as he was pulled forward into a hard kiss.

There was no passion here. No care. No genuine attraction. This kiss was made up of teeth and possession and gloating, as if Orbaz used the act to parade his temporary victory in front of Koltira and rub his nose in it. The bastard probably got off on the idea.

The hand at the back of his head suddenly fisted, knotting a chunk of Koltira's hair and sending scorching white light flaring behind his eyelids and burning away everything it touched. Koltira whimpered and shuddered; sensing an exploit, Orbaz dragged his nails across the back of Koltira's scalp, sending Koltira spiraling until, lost to his own lust, he came down Faltora’s throat with a snarl and a spasm of his hands that dragged shallow lines into the other man's head.

Orbaz pulled back and watched Koltira empty himself into Faltora. The mortal gagged, his whole body recoiling and tightening down as Koltira rode his climax through a few more thrusts before pulling out again with a low grunt.

Faltora choked wetly, doubtless coughing up a mouthful of spunk. The sound pushed Orbaz over the edge, and with a snarl he slammed into the mortal and unloaded, crushing Faltora against him as he pumped his seed into the elf.

Faltora trembled as Orbaz fell across him with a hard growl; when Orbaz licked along the edge of one long ear, the mortal stiffened and bleated helplessly, like a lamb caught by the wolf.

 _Was this how you looked yesterday, Koltira?_ Orbaz asked. _Creamed and mewling like a newborn kitten?_

Koltira did not respond, though wordless anger lashed at him again across their link.

Orbaz snorted and gave Faltora another handful of hard thrusts before pulling out. The mortal crumbled to one side, boneless and quivering as he dripped from both ends.

It wasn't enough.

“Get under his head,” Orbaz ordered Koltira. “I want him on his back. I want him to look you in the eye while I'm stirring up his insides.”

Faltora thrashed weakly as Koltira pushed him onto his back, then dragged him about so that his head rested in the older elf’s lap.

Orbaz chucked and made a show of laying slowly across Faltora again, running his hands along the elf’s sides and licking at his chest and throat as he lined himself up and shoved into the mortal again.

“Stop,” Faltora whined. “Stop, p-please…”

“You talk too much, Faltora.” Orbaz rolled his hips, now, taking longer thrusts and grinding against Faltora’s half-hardened cock until the elf began to moan in spite of himself.

There was a smear of cum around Faltora’s lips. Orbaz licked at it, then smiled as Faltora turned his head away with a grimace.

“Don't be like that,” Orbaz murmured. “This would be so much easier for you if you would just cooperate.”

He licked at Faltora’s mouth again, parting the elf’s lips with his tongue and lapping at the row of clenched teeth behind them. One hand snaked up to cup his jaw, digging fingers into the pressure points there until Faltora’s mouth was forced open, then sliding down to rest lightly atop the mortal’s throat.

Orbaz felt Faltora’s jaw begin to flex as he licked his way into his mouth; soon, startlingly sharp teeth began to dig into his tongue, threatening to snap together and cut clean through the appendage the moment Faltora got his gall up to do it.

Orbaz grinned into their kiss. So, the little mortal still wanted to play rough, after all, did he?

Without breaking away, Orbaz tightened down with the hand at Faltora’s throat, squeezing until he felt the elf’s airway cut off. Faltora thrashed violently; his eyes snapped open wide and locked with Orbaz’ as his face began to turn red.

Orbaz watched him coolly, digging his thumb and fingers up against Faltora’s jaw to force it open while he lashed his tongue about the elf’s mouth. Faltora’s tongue had swollen by now, and lay limp against Orbaz’ as the elf slowly began to weaken.

Koltira sat unmoving beneath them, still carding his hands through Faltora’s hair as though the mortal wasn't being strangled to within an inch of his life.

 _You'll kill him prematurely at this rate,_ he sneered across their link. Hatred seethed through his thoughts like steam.

 _Please,_ Orbaz said. _Give me some credit, elf. I've been at this long enough to know when someone's at their limit._

Orbaz took his time with the kiss, waiting until Faltora’s eyes flickered before slowly pulling away and releasing him. The elf gasped and fell into a ragged coughing fit as Orbaz resumed pumping into him.

“If you're going to attack me, little elf, I suggest you do it the instant the thought occurs to you.” Orbaz leaned down and bit hard into the skin across Faltora’s collarbone, drawing blood and another squeal from the elf. “It's not as though you've got much time left to waste being indecisive.”

“Pity… you were born… at all,” Faltora gasped, venom lacing his words.

Orbaz narrowed his eyes.

 _You should have taught your brother to keep his mouth shut,_ he told Koltira. For all his ire, his thoughts were smooth and bordered on civil.

 _Why?_ Koltira asked, his tone just as mild. _Did he hit a nerve, Orbaz?_

The thrusting stopped.

Without warning, Faltora arched away from the ground and screamed. Koltira looked up before Orbaz could force him to and saw the human with his cock half-embedded in the stab wound in Faltora’s thigh.

“Almost as good as any c---,” Orbaz sneered. This, as everything else Orbaz had said, was spoken in Common, and despite his own fluency with the language Koltira didn't recognize the last word - but it didn't take a genius to guess at what it meant.

Faltora whimpered, and a hard shudder rolled through him as Orbaz ran a hand up along the inside of his injured thigh. It was another slow, tender stroke, as though the human found Faltora’s suffering beautiful. As though Orbaz found something praiseworthy in the tears glittering around his eyes and the unceasing trembling of his body.

The human's hand came to a stop at the hard tendon between Faltora’s thigh and groin. Faltora jolted, likely fearing that tendon would be ripped out or torn in two, but it was his own movement that brought him suffering: Orbaz still had his cock halfway into Faltora’s thigh, and the mortal's flinch jarred the connection with a wet sound that was nearly lost beneath Faltora’s yelp. Orbaz' chuckle at the display quickly turned into a low, purring moan; kneeling as he was astride the mortal's leg, Orbaz had likely felt only pleasure as the limb writhed beneath him.

The human pulled out of Faltora’s leg and ground against it, smearing blood across the pale skin and tipping his head back as his bloodshot eyes fluttered closed for a moment. Koltira turned his gaze away from the look on Orbaz' face—and found himself staring instead at the man's throat.

Dark, ugly marks colored Orbaz' neck, and the swell of his windpipe was noticeably crooked, as though it had been crushed beyond the cultists' ability to completely repair.

Someone had had the immense pleasure of crushing the life from Orbaz with their bare hands. Koltira envied them.

Orbaz lowered his head, locking eyes with Koltira and grinning as he snapped his hips forward and penetrated Faltora’s leg again. This time he sheathed himself completely, drawing another scream from the mortal in the process.

"You should try this, Koltira,” the bastard suggested. “Provided our little whore doesn't faint before I finish.”

Faltora writhed beneath them, and Koltira looked down to see his brother's hands turn to white-knuckled claws and gouge deep lines into the foamy soil beneath his back. Another thrust, another scream, and Faltora’s eyes wheeled about before finding Koltira's face again.

“Shhh,” Koltira soothed, running a careful hand through Faltora’s matted blond hair. His eyes stung again. “It won't hurt for long.”

“Broth--” Faltora’s mouth opened wide as another, more strangled cry clawed its way out into the open air. Koltira switched to stroking one of the mortal's long ear tips; this seemed to counteract the pain more thoroughly, though Faltora still writhed and wailed as Orbaz laughed and began to pick up speed.

 _Shall I make you tear that ear off?_ the pig asked. _The ranger woman I took nearly snapped her chains when I threatened to do it to her._

 _And rob us of a pleasure point to exploit?_ Koltira's thoughts were slow, now, and in spite of his fury everything had begun to seem unnaturally cold and calm. A piece of his mind worried what might happen if that calm were to break.

 _Maybe you'd start having fun,_ Orbaz suggested. Nothing in Koltira's mind was hidden from him. _Go ahead, elf. Let loose. We all know you want to. Show me why Thassarian took such an interest in you,_ he added in a sneer.

Thassarian.

Sweet Light, Thassarian was here. Thassarian was watching them.

Nausea twisted Koltira's guts again, hard and cold, and the sting in his eyes became a burn as he lowered his head to hide the single tear that managed to overflow and spill down his cheek.

Thassarian was watching him.

Orbaz snarled audibly; there was a long, wet rip, and Faltora’s eyes snapped wide as a piercing shriek ripped from his throat.

Koltira wasn't allowed to look for the cause of his brother’s suffering; Orbaz tightened down his control over the older elf, freezing him in place for an instant before forcing him out from under Faltora and around to lay across the mortal.

“Fuck him,” Orbaz snapped. “Up the ass, until one of you spills. _Now,”_ he growled, and Koltira obeyed, slamming himself into Faltora with no preparation. The mortal cried out, cringing up against Koltira's stomach; then after his first few thrusts, Koltira felt his brother begin to fall limp.

Orbaz noticed it, as well, and snarled a long string of slurs at the brothers… only to stop suddenly, and then break into a low, lascivious laugh that raised the hair along the back of Koltira's neck.

A moment later, the human's weight settled across Koltira's back, and Koltira hissed as Orbaz rammed into him and immediately began thrusting, throwing his own cadence off before forcing him to follow the pace Orbaz now set. It was a harder, more merciless strip, and Faltora mewled thinly in protest.

 _“Ha,”_ Orbaz growled. “He's still awake, after all. Koltira,” he added mockingly, “you weren't supposed to lull him to sleep.”

“You’ll burn for this,” Faltora rasped. His eyes shone with hatred as he snarled up at Orbaz, and Koltira felt his heart grab with fierce love even as his stomach seemed to chill and turn to stone.

“To hell with you, mortal.” Orbaz planted his hand in the middle of Faltora’s throat and levered enough weight onto it that Faltora’s gasp was cut short. “I grow tired of your mouth.”

“Done with him already?” Koltira's voice was hollow even as he grunted and struggled to stay upright under the hard pace Orbaz set.

There was a coarse chuckle, and teeth met briefly in Koltira's ear, sending a shot of pleasure through him. When the white haze cleared from his vision, Faltora had blacked out and gone still beneath Orbaz’ crushing grip.

“Yes,” Orbaz growled. “Yes, we are.”

Now he removed his hand; Faltora gasped and choked, but did not regain consciousness.

“Cut his throat and let's be done with it, then,” Koltira suggested. His voice caught wretchedly in his throat.

“No, Koltira.” Orbaz laughed again and licked along the side of Koltira's neck, slow and possessive. _“You_ kill him. He is _your_ brother, after all.”

Of course he would. Of course.

Koltira lowered his head, trying to brace himself better against Orbaz’ thrusting as he rested against Faltora’s neck. He could feel his brother's pulse, weak and fluttering but still there, still radiating heat and life. If Faltora were to be pried away from them, even now, he could live. He could recover and become hale and whole again. He was strong enough.

No help was coming. No healing, no kindness awaited Faltora now—save one last act.

Koltira lifted one hand and smoothed the pale hair from Faltora’s face as he gave his throat a final, gentle kiss. Insensate though the younger elf was, he could have sworn he felt a feeble tremble pass through his brother's skin.

“Finish it,” Orbaz murmured, his breath soft across Koltira's ruined ear.

Resting his hand now against the top of the mortal’s head, Koltira drew his lips back and sank his teeth into Faltora’s throat, chewing down until blood sprayed into his mouth and across his face. Faltora gagged and jerked fitfully for the span of a few final heartbeats… and then the spray became a trickle, and Koltira's brother fell lifeless, at last, beneath him.

Orbaz gave a hard thrust and came into Koltira, loud and unabashed as he snarled his victory. When he did silence himself, he did it by burying his teeth into Koltira's shoulder, overlapping the mark Thassarian had left the day before and shaking his head like a dog to further shred the flesh.

Koltira felt only a dull pain. The shaking was more intolerable, and even that… was nothing.

It stopped in another moment, and Koltira found himself sandwiched more firmly between Orbaz and Faltora as the human leaned down to suck and lap at the tattered remains of Faltora’s throat. His hands still worked mindlessly at Koltira's chest and ass, massaging them, teasing them regardless of the lack of response it drew now from Koltira.

He scarcely felt those hands anymore.

The control Orbaz had over him finally dissolved. Koltira felt his own command of his body return to him. He thought he sensed Arthas’ presence for a moment, but it was faint and swiftly gone.

He could get up, now, if he wanted. He could turn on Orbaz and avenge this hell he had created. Somehow, he felt as though the violence would even be an easier thing to commit than simply continuing to lie here—as though he _should_ attack Orbaz. As though he was _expected_ to meet his own suffering with an act of aggression.

And he wanted to. He truly, desperately wanted to.

…But would it be rebellion? Was it truly right to turn on a brother-in-arms? Or would he be punished again, and again, and again if he attacked Orbaz now?

He wanted to. Surely, surely it would stop hurting, even for a moment, if he took it out of Orbaz.

What would they take from him next?

Koltira closed his eyes and folded into Orbaz’ savage celebration. From across the shattered sanctuary, he felt Thassarian's eyes boring into him.

They would take nothing more.

He would give them no reason to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Put me in a dumpster and set it on fire.


End file.
